Sharing Google Calendars

Video Transcript

"So now I am going to talk about some of the ways you can share your Google calendar. It is a really great feature of this product because you create your calendar and if you want to share those events with any other person or publicly, Google makes it real easy. So just real quick, probably the easiest way to do it, go to "My Calendar", click on the little down arrow and then click "Share this Calendar" and it is bringing up, if you remember from earlier, the "calendar details". Under the "Share this calendar" link, you see these options. You have got this "Share with everyone" option and you have got, "do not share with everyone, share all information on this calendar with everyone and share only my free busy information". To learn more about that you just click right here on the little link and it just tells you what all this means. When you are sharing with everybody that means that everybody will be able to view your calendar through the search results on Google Calendar searches". So, if you want to make this public to everybody, you would check that. The "share only my free busy information means that others could subscribe to your calendar but, would only be able to see if you are free or busy and they would not be able to see any of your details. Then by default if you marked the "do not share with everyone" is what you are going to be using if this is your private calendar. The next option is to "Share with specific people" which is probably I think one of the coolest things you can do with Google calendar. So if you had a couple of guys who were running a small business they might be able to "share Google calendar" and then everybody in that business could create and edit events on that calendar. By default you see my name here, somebody is already added, so I will delete that so I can show you what happens. This is me, I created this calendar so I am the only person on it right now, but if I wanted to add a new person, I would just start typing their name and Google brings up from "my contacts", the first person. If they are not in your contacts you will just have to enter their email. See when I add that person now they come up right here. I have to set the permissions, so you have the option to see all event details, "make changes to events and manage sharing and then see free busy information. So the see free busy information, no details, because they would be able to see it, just like it says only the free busy information that you enter when you create your events, no details. "See all event details" basically means like a read only, they can see if but they can not make any changes. "Make changes" means they can see it and they can make changes. "Make changes and manage sharing" means they see it, make changes and add new people, just like I just added this person; they can add somebody new to this calendar. So decide which one you want and then you would just "save" and Google will send a little message to that person notifying that they have been allowed to share on this calendar. The next time they sign in to Google Calendar they will be able to see it. One other way to share is down here if you go to "Calendars details" and then go to the bottom, you have your "Calendars address" and your private address. If you would like to access your Google Calendar from a different program, or are flying, this what you would use, this calendar. Actually for publicly or for another person you would use this calendar address and it has XML, ICAL and HTML. If you want to learn more about what this is you just click on "Learn more" and it says, A Calendar Address is the public address for your calendar, when you make you calendar public, others can view it using various applications including Google calendar as well as any feed reader and a product that supports the ICAL format. So if you have some one else that wants to view your calendar in a different format this is where you would probably go to get them that. Say if it was ICAL, you would just click on this and then it gives you a link that you would need to paste into their ICAL so they can see the calendar. Basically on the same premise if you want to be able to see your Google calendar in a different application, you would use the private address and this is just for you and not for anyone else. It is the same ICAL, XML , HTML. So those are the three basic ways to share your Google calendars and like I said sharing with specific people is real useful if you want to get organized with a particular person. Share your events and what is going on in your life and they would be able to change things or whatever. But if you want to share with everyone, you want to set your calendar to "Share with everyone" and that will appear in the Google Calendar search results and that would be good for maybe a small business or something like a band. Something that you want everybody to be able to see what you are putting on there. Like if you were a band, you would put all your show dates and then somebody could search for that band up here and if they found it, they would be able to add it to their calendars and every time that band updated their show dates, it would update on my calendar and I could see it right away. So those are some of the ways you can share your Google calendars."