Display your Google Calendar in Vista’s Windows Calendar
One of the greatest things you’ll find on Windows Vista is it’s answer to the iCal, Windows Calendar. Unlike many other desktop calendars, Windows Calendar allows you to subscribe to various types of calendars such as Google Calendar and receive updates. This is great if you prefer Windows Calendar over other calendars but still want to receive data from online sources. For example, Gmail allows you to quickly add an event notice from your email to Google Calendar, but not Windows Calendar.
First you need to get to the iCal link of your calendar, since Windows Calendar can only subscribe to the .ics format. To do so, navigate to Settings > Calendars > Name of your Calendar
Scroll down and you will see a shiny ICAL button. Right click it, and choose Copy Shortcut or Copy Link Location.
Then head over to Windows Calendar and click on Subscribe at the top. You’ll be taken to this screen where you can paste the URL of your calendar into the textbox.
After pasting the link, click Next where you will be able to set how often your calendar updates, and a few other preferences.
I personally prefer it to update every 15 minutes, since I don’t see why you should have it update at one hour when you can have it update quicker. I’ve tried some registry hacking to see if you could have it update sooner, but I had no luck. If you find out how to make it update sooner, I’d appreciate it if you can drop a note.
Anyway, that’s basically it. The only downside is that this is only a one-way transmission. You can’t make entries in Windows Calendar and have it update on Google Calendar.
There’s a couple of great calendars online that you can use with Subscribe. For example, Google has a list of online calendars so I can have the Toronto Raptors playoff schedule on my Windows Calendar. There are also a thousand other great ones you can find at Apple.
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April 22nd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
[...] Display Google calendar in Vista sidebar link [...]
June 13th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
This is very cool.
June 25th, 2007 at 11:30 pm
This is a great post Albert. You’re now at the top of my RSS feed list.
What I’d really like to see is an explaination of how Windows Vista Calendar and Outlook 2007 Calnedar fit together — preferably with Google calendar. Do you have anything on this?
August 24th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Make sure you copy the correct shortcut. I was getting a 404 error - I had two ICAL buttons, one in a “private address” and a “calendar address” section, I had to use the one from the “private address” section.
October 27th, 2007 at 6:48 am
Well yeah, it depends. If you only want to download info from calendar use the private button. Or you can set calendar to public and then download it plus anyone can see it which is not so good
I wonder when google will come up with a good address book.
February 3rd, 2008 at 4:15 pm
My repeated events don’t show up using this