I’m a big fan of Google and its products. I’ve been using Gmail since early on its life (since June 14, 2004; I’m currently using 927 MB (34%) of my 2714 MB); I experimented with buying AdWords for my blog in November 2002; I’ve had AdSense ads on my site since May 2004. So when I learned yesterday that Google had launched a calendar offering — Google Calendar — I was immediately intrigued (and always expected that they would eventually offer one).
The technology and feature set are excellent (drag ‘n drop events, quick create events, multiple calendars with sharing, keyboard shortcuts!) — if you’ve used Gmail, you’ll be comfortable with Google Calendar — and the design simple, intuitive, and clean. Of course, there’s an integrated Google search so that you can search your events. There’s integration with Gmail, so that if Gmail recognizes an event, you can directly schedule it in your calendar. There’s the ability to send email reminders to yourself, which is pretty standard functionality, including daily agendas. And lots of other good stuff.
The problem, however, is that I’m pretty invested in Yahoo Calendar. I’ve been using it consistently for nearly 10 years — since 1998 — and used to synchronize it with my old school, early generation Palm Pilot.
Google Calendar does give you the ability to import other calendar data and suggests breaking apart the CSV files by year, so I did that yesterday with my Yahoo data and ended up with more than 6,000 calendar entries. A couple frustrating things about the import process:
- Recurring events are not designated as such, but are imported past and future — through 2037 — as individual events
- The timing is off post-import (e.g., a 12:30pm lunch in Yahoo Calendar shows up as 3:30pm in Google Calendar)
I’ve also experienced some sporadic errors in trying to import some of my data to Google Calendar. The archives — and maintaining accurate data — are important to me, so assuming I can get these kinks worked out, I just may migrate away from Yahoo Calendar after 8 years of usage.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Gabe A_nderson // Apr 14, 2006 at 10:15 am
On point #2 above (timing off)- I just reimported my 2006 events, and the times seem correct now, so maybe it was just a glitch during the import yesterday.
2 shrey // Apr 16, 2006 at 10:42 am
sounds like it was a timezone issue. which would be ironic since it’s a calendaring application.