Syncing Google Calendar With iCal

{ March 20, 2009 @ 1:05 am } · { New Media Drivers License }
{ Tags: , , , , , , , , }

Google Calendar can be a very useful tool for some people. As we talked about it a few weeks back, the fact that you can access to your own personal calendar as long as you have an internet connection can be very beneficial to many users. As I have been using this application for past a few weeks, I started wondering if there’s anyway to sync Google Calendar and my iCal. So I researched and found some useful tips for people like who wants to use iCal or Google Calendar.

1. Yes. You can sync your Google Calendar to with iCal. While there are a few ways to do this, I found that Google actually provides a utility called calaboration to configure Google Calendar as CalDAV calendar in iCal. Here’s how you do this.
a. go to this website: http://code.google.com/p/calaboration/ and download Calaboration_1.0.2.zip.
b. Once you complete downloading, decompress the file and double click on the calaboration icon

sync13

c. As shown in the picture, you can login with your google account and add your calendars to your iCal

2. For those of who uses iCal primarily and wants to sync items in iCal to your Google Calendar, I couldn’t find a way to do so without using “commercial applications”. However, you can just use old “import/export” function to update your Google Calendar. One drawback of this method, of-course, is that it won’t automatically update your calendar, which means that you would have to import/export the calendar every time you have a new events added to your iCal.

export2

export3 a. Go to File and select Export

b. Save the export file. Once you do that, you can go to your Google Calendar, select the setting under your calendar, and import the file you saved in a previous step.

When you have more than one useful application for same purpose, it could be sometimes confusing which application you should use. Calendar is one of the applications that are offered and availble in so many different forms. I’m sure that to be able to sync your calendars into one should minimize the confusion and make your life a bit easier.

Leave a Comment