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Friday 9 October 2015

Migrating to Google Calendar

If you are like me, and technology is moving so fast that it has morphed into magic over the past few years, then you might find this post useful.

By that, I mean that either something works, or it doesn't. And when it doesn't work, the source of the issue appears to be something as esoteric and unrelated as how you hold your mouth. Or whether you had salad dressing. Or something.

When things work auto-magically it is WONDERFUL. When they don't it is hair-tearing-out-frustration-and-screaming-at-the-universe-GRRRR!

There doesn't appear to be much in between, actually. A binary pairing. Wax on, wax off.

I have just migrated to an android phone. With that change, I have been trying - vainly - since getting it a month ago, to get Google calendar to sync with my Outlook calendar so I can have one common calendar across two PCs, a laptop and my phone.

I had assumed that it was my bloated, desktop-bound Outlook calendar that was at fault. I read everything I could get my hands on about how to sync calendars. I found, to my horror, that I had to manually synchronise the two <argh!> so I spent weeks trying to export my calendar as a .csv file, so that I could then import it to Google. Every time I tried, the blasted chunk of junk called Outlook crashed.

"Waily, waily!" I cried - to no avail, of course. I read blogs and helpdesk posts and techy stuff until my eyes bled. And then I found a cute little piece of kit called CodeTwo Outlook Sync. "Yay!" I exclaimed. My problems were solved!

At last I could export my calendar. And I did. However, I could not import it into my Google calendar. It would NOT import. "Google has imported 0 entries". What?!

Once more, I was back on the magic roundabout trying to understand Tech-ese. I found a useful post explaining that the column formats were wrong in my export from Outlook, and the formats were the barrier to my calendar data importing. I braced myself for data manipulation AND manual exporting and importing. My energy for tackling this task was at a low ebb, and each return to it was even more sapping.

But, then...! I found a wee blog post by Roland Waddilove on the topic of syncing the Outlook and Google calendars, recommending - gasp - a piece of freeware called Calendar Sync.

And it is just the piece of magic I needed.

No exporting. No importing. No data manipulation. Just a perfect turnkey piece of kit.

My calendars are synchronised. Free. Thanks PPPIndia!


Sam

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