Google Calendar is amazing. I’ve always seen it and have heard about it, but I never took the time to try it out. When I tried it out, I was really surprised to see what all it had to offer.

You have to have an account with Google to use it, but don’t worry, it’s easy to set up and it’s free as well.

Once you set up your account and logon to the Google Calendar page, it has a calendar waiting for you to use.  You can set up multiple calendars for multiple uses, like a private calendar and a public calendar, or a calendar for each member of the family.

You can set it up to receive notifications by e-mail, or text/SMS on your cell phone, when an event is added to the calendar, when changes/cancellations/responses to invitations are made, and daily notifications to update you on your schedule.  You can also get reminders by text/SMS or e-mail a certain ammount of time before the event is supposed to happen.  This is great, not only can you have your whole schedule on your cell phone, but you can be notified event by event right on your cell!

If you have GoogleDesktop with the Google Sidebar, you can add the Calendar Gadget that will retrieve information from your calendar straight to your desktop.  I tried this out, and the only downside to it is, in expanded view, the calendar is still too small to see all days of the week.  Every time you use the calendar you have to manually expand it to show all the dates.  To avoid this hassle however, you can make it show a list of the events/appointments you have scheduled on your calendar – rather than the actual calendar itself.

Another cool feature is the embed option.  You can embed your calendar into your own website or blog easily.  You can adjust the size, features, some colors, etc., and it will automatically generate a code that you can copy and paste into your web page/blog.

There are other ways to share your calendar if you choose to make it public, like RSS, iCAL, and a public accessable HTML code so people can embed YOUR calendar into THEIR webpage/blog.

There are more features to this neat calendar.  So if you want a calendar that notifies you by text/SMS and/or e-mail of your upcoming events, that you can embed into your web page/blog, that does so many things I can’t even list it, then you should head on over to the Google Calendar webpage and create your calendar.

What Do You Think?
Do you like Google Calendar?  Do you know of any cool, free calendar apps, or just cool, free apps in general?  Got a question on how to use the Google Calendar?  Let me know!!!  Send your thoughts to david@funkytower.com

Take it easy,
David Crandall