Yahoo Calendar

CNET editors' rating: 3.5 stars Very good
Detailed editors' rating
Setup and interface: 8.0
Features: 8.0
Performance: 0.0
Service and support: 5.0
Overall score: 7.0 (3.5 stars)
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Product summary

CNET editors' review

• Reviewed by:
  Elsa Wenzel
• Edited by:
  Rafe Needleman
• Reviewed on: 04/20/2006
• Released on: 08/17/1998

Accessing the free Yahoo Calendar is as simple as signing in to your Yahoo account from any Web browser on any PC; just visit calendar.yahoo.com. You can also access the calendar from within Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger (we hope that the next version of Yahoo Mail will do the same).

Yahoo Calendar offers a clean, intuitive layout with well-organized grids and plenty of white space. You can pick from among 16 color combinations and four background photo themes. Yahoo offers more in the way of cuteness than its rivals; its holidays, weather, and horoscopes pop with bright graphics.

Drop-down tabs across the top of the page let you skip to and from the Calendar and your Yahoo Mail messages, Address Book, and Notepad. A left-hand pane offers a tiny monthly view, as well as links for quickly adding events and tasks and searching scheduled appointments. The central pane features the calendar, viewable by lists of events and tasks or by day, week, month, or year. A printable view comes in handy if you need to slip a printout of events into a pocket.

Yahoo Calendar lets you click a time in the day view or the Add link in other views to pop up the entry window and start typing an appointment, and its central pane offers a Quick Add Event box that accepts free-form text input before demanding the date and time. Microsoft Outlook allows you to click twice on a time to add an event. Google Calendar lets you add appointments faster by clicking once on a date, then immediately typing into a text balloon.

We found Yahoo Calendar to be accessible enough for tech newbies to figure out, yet complete enough to keep a mobile professional on his or her toes. This service's sharing features can help you to coordinate events with other people if they are also Yahoo users. By default your calendar is private; just change the Sharing options to permit others to peek at your plans and make changes. You can also establish a Group Calendar, integrated with Yahoo Groups.

The uncluttered look and feel of Yahoo Calendar makes it painless to use after just a few minutes of tinkering.

Especially helpful for those on the go, Yahoo Calendar imports and exports data to and from Palm and Pocket PC, as well as Outlook DBA files, Lotus Organizer, and Act. Such synchronization demands the free Intellisync app, which took a few brief minutes to download in our tests on Windows XP. However, once we opened Intellisync and established our settings, it was unable to log in to Yahoo. This glitch mysteriously resolved itself about 15 minutes later, after which Yahoo seamlessly added all of our Outlook appointments to its Calendar. But while all of our Outlook Reminders appeared, Yahoo did not pop up alerts before impending events (though it can remind you via Yahoo Messenger, Mail, or mobile device); Google Calendar succeeded here.

Also unlike Yahoo Calendar, the AJAX-based Google Calendar beta not only imports from Outlook but also operates with XML, iCal, and CSV standards. However, we suspect that Yahoo may follow, especially as its acquisition, Upcoming.org, already offers RSS feeds, iCal integration, and event exports to Yahoo Calendar. While Yahoo Calendar lacks the potential to add outside content via RSS, for now it does enable you to schedule updates from Yahoo Groups, Sports, and Finance services. Yahoo is planning to follow Google's open-source lead by eventually opening its Calendar code to developers, as it did for Yahoo Maps following the popularity of Google Maps mashups.

Aside from linking to your in-box, Yahoo Calendar lacks integration with Yahoo Mail. Google Calendar goes a step further by building in natural language skills that recognize a potential appointment within an e-mail and flag it for scheduling. For instance, we'd like Yahoo Calendar to let us instantly insert names and contacts from our e-mail address book.

Yahoo Calendar is easy to learn. You can access a well-organized, searchable online knowledge base from a Help link on each page, but Yahoo offers no phone or e-mail support. For complex questions, you're out of luck in trying to reach a Yahoo expert.

See more CNET content tagged:

Yahoo! Inc.,

Intellisync,

appointment,

Yahoo! Mail,

iCal

User reviews

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• Showing 1 of 1 user reviewSee 1 user review

• 4.0 stars

  "have been using for years without problems"

  by boston25 on April 26, 2006

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Where to buy Yahoo Calendar

Access this free service from the developer's Web site.