Google Basics Part 3 – Google Calendar

- It is time for part three of our Google extravaganza, our back to basics series on the Google ecosystem. We've already looked at your Google Account in part one, Gmail in part two and today it's Google Calendar on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto here how the heck you doing this fine day? At Dotto Tech we make technology easy so you can do more, and today's show is our third in a five-part series on the Google ecosystem. The goal of this series is to teach you how all the different pieces of Google fit together and work together. 'cause each one each tool that we look at standalone is a pretty good tool, but it's when they're integrated this is when they work with each other that the real magic starts to come out. So this is a very back to basics series. So if you're an experienced Google Calendar user there's a very good chance you will learn absolutely nothing new today, but if you're not a very experienced Google Calendar user then there should be plenty of value in today's lesson. So we're gonna start talking about Google Calendar from the perspective of just how it appears on our desktop, but it's really important to understand that Google Calendar like all of the Google tools are online services. They're software as a service that lives in the Cloud. So everything we do on the desktop which I'll be showing you right now is also reflected in works in our mobile device, and in the calendar world that is especially important because typically speaking when you're sitting at your desk it's important to know what's on your calendar, but it's really important to know what's on your calendar when you're out and about and running around. And think about it when you're running around is so often when you're making appointments. When you're at the dentist and you're making the next appointment, or you're checking what's upcoming. So integrating with your phone is a tremendously important part of this entire equation. Will show you the mobile integration at the end of the demo today, but I wanna start with an overview of Google Calendar itself. It's free of course along as a part of the Google's ecosystem is that part of the entire Google suite of tools, and in this particular case for the demo today I'm not use the demo account that I set up I'm gonna use my real calendar account because it's far more populated, and Google Calendar is a tool that you will refine over time to your own needs. It's a tool that you are gonna end up customizing quite a bit. Now I think calling it Google Calendar is almost a misnomer. They should probably call it Google calendars plural because typically speaking we don't just have one calendar that we live off. One of the beauties of Google calendar is you can create multiple calendars that stack one on top of the other and can kinda shine through each other to give you a lot more control over your life. So you can have a work calendar, a home calendar, a personal calendar, a workout calendar, you can have a business calendar, you can have all different calendars you can share family members calendars so you can see all of the appointments that might be important in your life all in one combined screen. That's a really important feature that's built into Google Calendar. Now as you look at my version of Google Calendar it might look slightly different than yours and that's primarily because Google Calendar is very flexible in how you view your information. Looking at the main screen right here on the right hand side next to the Settings Menu is a chance for us to choose how we view our calendar. I've got mine set for month right now which shows my entire month at a glance, but you can quickly switch to the week at a glance, you can switch to a four day view, there's even a schedule of you which just basically compresses everything into your actual appointments, so you're just see appointment after appointment being laid out. So there's lots of flexibility about how you layout your calendar. Now over here on the left hand side they call this the Main Menu. I think if I was in charge I would call it a sidebar but they call it a Main Menu, and in it is a little mini Quick Pick calendar. so you can jump around the calendars very quickly here, but down below is a listing of all of the different calendars that I either own or am subscribe to. And this is really the beginning of the power of Google Calendar. Before we even talk about appointments and setting up individual appointments I'm gonna talk to you about how the calendars works because it's so important. As I mentioned just a few moments ago you can set up multiple calendars for different related topics. So if you see here these are the calendars that I own. I've got my own personal calendar which is my own schedule. It's my agenda. I also have an editorial calendar for how I publish all of our content, and then there's a reminders calendar and a task and a webinar schedule calendar that I have that puts up all of my different puts up the schedule for producing all of the webinars that we do on a weekly basis. Plus down here in other calendars these are calendars that I've subscribed to. They can be other people's calendars such as I've got my wife's calendar here her work calendar here, but also different applications that have date related content within them. Can also populate calendars for me. So for example right here Asana tasks. This is our task manager and project manager. And watch what happens to my screen when I turn on that calendar. All of these new tasks come on to my screen because they're all generated out of Asana, and I've got actually several different calendars within Asana for different types of things. I also am subscribed to other calendars like holidays in Canada, the Vancouver Canucks my local hockey team, you can subscribe to public calendar such as the holidays and the Vancouver Canucks calendar, or private calendars such as your spouses calendar or somebody else who is a team member's calendar so you can see other people's appointments. This integration and this awareness of other calendars is really at the heart of some of the real strengths of Google Calendar. Once you understand this and feel comfortable with multiple calendars you can turn on and off calendar layers to make it more clear what's happening in your day, but you can also very quickly then set what your obligations are, or your opportunities for time are against what else is happening in your universe. So I love this fact that I can kind of layer these calendars this way. So that's a kind of a global view of how multiple calendars work within Google Calendar. And we'll show you later on this video just how to create a new calendar. I'll show you that process 'cause I think that's important to recognize. But before I do the real building blocks of your calendar are events. The events screen is where all of the magic happens in Google Calendar. And so what you do if you wanna create a new event which is you know an appointment effectively is you can just either click within the date itself of the date you want or you can click on the little plus sign here which will create an event. Now this screen that you see here is a screen that you're going to get become intimately comfortable with as you use Google Calendar more and more because there is so much power packed into this event screen it's wonderful. So first of all we create a title. So let's say the title is going to be a we're gonna have a "Team Meeting." Team meeting, and I'm gonna be setting up team oh, that's a good idea team meeting. And then you can set the date, you can just quick pick the date I'm gonna set it for 20th, and I get you can set the time we'll make it at 2 p.m. Now the timezone is gonna be based on your time zone, and when you share this because a big part of what we're gonna do what you can do with this is you can share this appointment with others and have people confirm that they are have an appointment with you. It will automatically transcribe the time into their local time zone. A big benefit there. So you set the time or if it's gonna be an all-day event and here you can set up repeating events. So if you do the same, if you have a team meeting every Thursday at 2 p.m. you can set them up for every Tuesday at 2 p.m. You can set up repeating meetings that will automatically populate it into your calendar. So that is another kind of one of the nice powerhouse features that's built in. Now we have the event details, and we can make this an online meeting or we can make it a Zoom meeting. We can add by clicking here because I have integrated Zoom with my Chrome browser, one of the other aspects of Google Calendar actually all of the Google suite of tools is we can integrate other tools into the Google tools. And in this particular case I have installed the Chrome extension for Zoom meetings because we use Zoom as our main video conferencing tool. So now it appears here and if I click on this it fills in all of the registration information so people can join in on the meeting so they know what to click and they know exactly how to get into the meeting itself. Isn't that cool? Now this is valuable if it's your team, but this is incredibly valuable if you're inviting somebody from the outside into your meeting. So you can set that up here. You could also set up a location if it was gonna be an actual physical location. So if we were gonna meet at Earls in Richmond, Earls Richmond BC. I'm gonna take this in and see if it works. Ah there it is Earls Kitchen and Bar in Richmond BC. So it actually does a Google search. Ah, another piece of integration, Google Calendar is now integrating with Google Search and Google Maps and it's pulling up the location here. Now the cool thing is when we go to actually go to Earls if we weren't gonna have it on Zoom but we were gonna go to the restaurant when I go to that restaurant when I pull up the appointment on my calendar on my phone it'll tell me how long it's gonna take me to get there and it'll even invoke Google Maps and give me directions on how to get there. This is where the integration really starts to be magic, and you start to recognize the power of integrating all of the different tools of Google together. So here we're using Google Calendar, Google Search and Google Maps all together to help organize us and get us to our appointment on time and where we're supposed to be. Absolutely brilliant. If you weren't using Zoom conferencing you can add other conferencing tools such as Google Hangouts or you could incorporate Skype or some other tool here. The notification window tells you whether or not you can set how early you're gonna be reminded for a meeting. So in this particular case because I might have to be driving 30 minutes to get to the restaurant I might just change that selection and say I wanna be reminded 45 minutes before this meeting I wanna a notification come through to remind me that I have this meeting so you can set things up that way. Next this is really cool. This is which of my calendars that I own is this gonna go on? Is this particular appointment can go on? And you see all of the calendars have a color code as well. So the calendars all have a default color code, but you could also change the color of any of your appointments. So if you like to put all of your you know kind of personal work tasks in one color you can set them all up, you can set up your own color code system if you choose. And people who really really dive into the deep end of using Google Calendar will often do that. They will often color code all of their appointments so that when they are looking at their calendar they see by color exactly what kind of activities they're gonna be involved in. And that's a really great technique to work with. This is whether or not you're gonna be busy or not. So this is if you're sharing your calendars with other, if you want to let people know whether or not you have this appointment or not, you can either classify this time as busy or free, or you can set it up for visibility as far as public or private visibility when you're sharing your calendar with other people. So really granular support over top of how you use the calendar. And then you've got this description, this event description field which is a full HTML window, so if you were actually planning on a meeting, on a business meeting, a team meeting, you could put the agenda in here, you can attach other documents in here, you can create bullet points and ordered lists, or you can create web links all right within this document that then when you share it with others, when you share the point with others they'll be able to see the agenda here. Again terrific flexibility. Now I've been talking a lot about the fact that this event screen while it will organize your calendar can also be used to invite in to work with others. And on the right-hand side here is where we can add different guests to the meeting. And all you do is you click on the window and you start typing in people's names and you can invite somebody. So I'm gonna invite April from our team and here is April, and so now I can send an invitation to her and then when I go to save this you see here that it will invite others if they are here listed out as a guest a participant in the meeting. And the cool thing is it sends an email to their email address and you'll all receive these emails. It's a a Google, a Gmail email that comes into your inbox and it says you are invited to this event are you gonna attend? And you click on yes I'm gonna attend, it'll automatically populate your calendar plus it'll send back notification to me that the person is going to attend the meeting. Tremendous control over everything through this interface. Now I'm actually gonna remove April because I don't want her to think that we have a meeting coming up and I'm gonna save this because I wanna show this to you on the smartphone so you can see how this appointment that we just created looks. And where's it? Here it is right there team meeting on the 20th, so now it's appeared here in the calendar. So it's that easy for you to create different events, and if you would look at the view in different ways if we go to the week view and we move to next week when that meeting is will see that meeting in, was 20th wasn't it? So it's two weeks from now, there it is right there, and there's the team meeting right there and it says at Earls Kitchen and Bar actually have it both Zoom and Earls Kitchen Bar. If I need to go in and edit at any point I just click on it and I have all of the details right here that I can go in and I can modify that meeting. So that gives you an idea of kinda the basic structure of Google calendars. Now I'm gonna show you how to create a new calendar other than your basic calendar that you started with, and I'm gonna show you the preferences as well before we jump and take a look at it in mobile. So the first thing to do is how to create a new calendar. And you create a new calendar I'm trying to remember how you do it. Do we do it here? Let's take a look here. Let's go into Settings. Ah, there it is Add a Calendar. And here we go Add a New Calendar. So here's where I said we can add our own new calendar, but you could also subscribe to other calendars that other people have or public calendars that you can download. I'll show you more on that in a minute, but if I'm gonna create a new calendar I click here and that creates a new calendar where I give it a name, I make it my calendar, add a description and I'm not gonna do this because I don't need extra calendars right now, but that is the process of going through and creating a brand new calendar. Now with any of the calendars that you've created you can then share those calendars and lemme show you how that happens. By clicking on the calendar here in the sidebar I can go down and I can share it with specific people. So here I have it actually shared my calendar with Shannon with my wife so that she can see my calendar. Now if you wanna share it with individuals you do it by email address like that, but if you also wanna have a public calendar that you share with many people you can create a shareable link. Now why would you wanna create a public calendar? You might be wondering. Well, let's say that I coach a little softball team a kid's softball team. I can create a public calendar of our schedule of games and practices and I can then create a shareable link that I email out to all of the parents of the kids that I coach on the softball team and then they can load that calendar and subscribe to that calendar so it will appear on their calendar when they're looking at it. Do you get the brilliance? This is a tremendously powerful tool. I have to say that I think in my mind Google Calendar might be one of my favorite tools that Google has because it is just so darn powerful. Now before we leave I wanna take you into the mobile version of Google Calendar so you can see how all of this information is mirrored within the calendar on the mobile app, but you even get some additional integration here. So I've got my calendar here open and in this calendar if you hit the hamburger menu on the left-hand side that gets you into all of your different selections as far as how you view your calendar. If you wanna view week at a glance, month at a glance et cetera, and also turn on and off your different calendars from this position here. But what I really wanna show you right now is I can just scroll to the right to the 20th there it is there, and there's our team meeting. That's the meeting right there that we were just talking about. And if we open that this is the coolest thing. It looks at the location of the meeting and it pulls a graphic if it can from the website or from the the Google business page of the business that you have the meeting at. So we see it right there. But also if I just tap here on the location up comes Google Maps it'll give me directions on how to get to that location. I really like how this integration works. And Google Maps of course now is also monitoring traffic. So it's telling you how long it will take you to get there. So before you even leave home if you've got an appointment you know if there's gonna be traffic congestion and if you should be leaving a little bit earlier. Just some really great integrated technology, and that's what the Google ecosystem brings to the table. The fact that all of these different apps talk to each other. If you think about all the things that can talk to Google Calendar are, email can talk to Google Calendar setting up appointments, verifying appointments and in confirming attendance and even populating our calendar from a click within a Gmail within an email within an email request. Of course Google Maps and Google Search works as we saw in setting up the event screen, and they all work together seamlessly to help keep us on track and make us that much more productive. Google Calendar winner winner chicken dinner all the way as far as I'm concerned. So that wraps up part three of our five-part series on the Google ecosystem. We've looked at Accounts, Gmail and now Google Calendar. So what's up next Steve? I'll tell you what's up next, we're gonna be talking about Google Drive. Google Drive is Google's online suite of applications. Word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and online storage. We'll be looking at that in our next episode. So if you have not yet subscribed to this channel please for heaven's sake subscribe to the channel and while you're at it a nice thumbs up for this video would be greatly appreciated. Plus if you have any questions if you want more details on any topics give us a comment below. Well, I don't have time to reply to every comment I guarantee you I read each comment, and what you ask for often ends up as one of our videos here at Dotto Tech. So thanks so much for spending this time with us, take some time and watch one of our other videos. Till next time I am Steve Dotto. I found stove in my castle.