Google Calendar beta

CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
Detailed editors' rating
Installation and interface: 8.0
Features: 8.0
Service and support: 5.0
Overall score: 7.0 (3.5 stars)
• Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 23 reviews
• See all user reviews

Product summary

CNET editors' review

• Reviewed by:
  Elsa Wenzel
• Reviewed on: 04/24/2006
• Released on: 04/14/2006

The Google Calendar beta is a straightforward, dynamic online appointment book that can keep you up-to-date with your own private schedule as well as those from other users and public events. The advantages of Google Calendar beta over the industry-leading Yahoo Calendar are its open architecture, RSS support, and integration with Gmail. For an overview, see a video demonstration of Google Calendar here.

To use the free Google Calendar, go to calendar.google.com and sign in with your Gmail password--or you can reach it through a link within the Gmail interface. The uncluttered look and feel resemble Yahoo Calendar and Outlook, with the central pane showing views of days, weeks, months, four days ahead, or your agenda. It is easier to add events in Google Calendar than it is in Yahoo Calendar; just click once within any time view of Google Calendar beta to pop up a balloon with a text field. A list of your calendars, color-coded if you have several, appears within the left pane beneath a mini monthly view.

The clean layout of Google Calendar beta lets you quickly add an event and view multiple calendars within one screen.

Google Calendar lets you import calendars from Microsoft Outlook, but Yahoo Calendar offers syncing with Outlook and mobile devices, which is more attractive for mobile pros. For example, there's no easy way to regularly export Outlook appointments to your Google Calendar without duplicating events. You can migrate events from Yahoo Calendar, but first you'll have to export them from Yahoo as an Outlook file. And unlike with Yahoo, Google Calendar's print-ready views didn't work at the time of our review.

The AJAX-based Google Calendar beta offers the potential for you to mash it up with other data sets to your liking, as fans of Google Maps have done. An open API isn't available (yet) for Yahoo Calendar.

Google Calendar beta works with XML, iCal, and CSV standards. Its XML capabilities leave the door open for scheduling possibilities. For example, rather than slotting in events only from the vendor's properties (Yahoo Calendar includes only items from its own services, such as Upcoming.org, Yahoo Groups, Sports, and Finance), Google Calendar has the potential for you to be able to integrate events from any number of sources, such as blogs. For example, if your favorite art gallery, theater, or book club uses a compatible calendar service, you could instantly add those shindigs to your personal Google Calendar so that you won't miss parties around town.

For scheduling by Google Calendar, Gmail flagged a message containing text that referred to a meal date. However, we outsmarted the calendar by naming two times in our message. Google flagged "breakfast at 9 a.m. on Saturday" but ignored "dinner at eight on Tuesday."

As a time-saving novelty, we like that Google Calendar beta interprets text within e-mail and can create appointments based on them. If your friend e-mails you, for example, Gmail will flag the words "breakfast at 9 a.m. on Saturday" so that you can immediately add the meal to the appropriate time on Google Calendar. Similarly to Outlook and Evite, the Google Calendar beta lets you send invitations to anyone--even to people who don't use Gmail. You can do this quickly within the app; Yahoo Calendar, on the other hand, forces you to cut and paste an invite link, then jump to its mail app. Google Calendar also offers event reminders, including SMS updates, to keep you on your toes. And, of course, you can search Google Calendar easily.

You can make your own events available to the public by exporting a file that RSS readers (such as the Google Reader beta) can display. What about privacy? Your own Google Calendar is private by default, though you can open it to particular people or to the whole Web. And while Google scans the text within your Gmail messages in order to serve you targeted ads, the company says that it will not scan text in your private calendars.

The Google Calendar beta is easy to learn, and its helpful online tour can lead you through the basics. A well-organized, searchable online knowledge base is accessible from a Help link on each page, as is a user discussion group. However like Yahoo, no phone or e-mail support is available.

Overall, the Google Calendar beta makes a convenient and easy-to-use online calendar tool, especially for users of Gmail. For now, fans of Yahoo Calendar should stick to their own service, especially if they need to sync their Outlook and mobile calendars for work. But Google Calendar's ability to detect potential appointments within the text of Gmail messages sets it apart from competitors. And the potential for savvy users to add more features to this open-code beta leaves us wondering what to expect next from Google Calendar.

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User reviews

• Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 23 reviews
• My rating: 0 stars Write review

• Showing 3 of 23 user reviewsSee all 23 user reviews

• 4.0 stars

  7 out of 8 people found this review helpful

  "Easy-to-Use and Good Design Makes this Web 2.0 App a Must"

  by gamespy2945 on April 16, 2006

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• 2.0 stars

  6 out of 7 people found this review helpful

  "Google Calendar has quite a ways to go to be useful"

  by jallen64 on April 25, 2006

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• 2.0 stars

  3 out of 7 people found this review helpful

  "Palm Desktop is Free No Palm Needed"

  by MarkRonning on April 25, 2006

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• See all 23 user reviews Write review

Where to buy Google Calendar beta

Visit the developer's Web site to access this free beta service.