Organizing with Google Calendars: Part IV – Importing Calendars

Welcome to Part IV of You’re So Organized, my continuing series of how I use Google Calendars to digitally organize just about everything.

In Part I, I gave an explanation of the basic tools in G:Cal, including new appointments, repeating appointments, and scheduling reminders in advance.

In Part II, I covered color coding calendars with different purposes to make separate tasks and schedules easier and more distinct from one another. 

In Part III, I talked about sharing calendars and sharing calendar appointments to make managing common schedules a lot easier.

Now we’re going to talk about importing calendars. This is FUN. You pick out the calendars and schedules you want, and add them to your calendar.

Importing calendars is a powerful option. There are TONS of different options that folks have already created that you can import. Sports team schedules, moon cycles (the actual moon, not your personal moon), weather, holidays in different countries – so many. And because they import as individual calendars, you can hide them if you don’t wish them to be visible.

First, I’m going to start with an example of importing a specific calendar by URL, and then I’ll show some of the other options available.

Our example: DABWAHA.

Of course it has a calendar! Between our different time zones and my not ever knowing what day, time, or year it is, the tournament needs a calendar.

Would you like to import it onto your calendar so you know when voting rounds are, when the second chance tournament is open, and when the finals are? OF COURSE YOU DO.

Well, maybe not. But if you’d like to practice importing, this is an easy example.

Sometimes, when you’re looking for calendars to import, you go browsing among the pre-made awesomeness that you can add with one click. In other cases, like this one, you may be given the URL to import a calendar, and you use that.

So! Here’s the DABWAHA calendar URL:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/0tn564hl41mc3ajn3e9a8tqngc%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

Copy that! The whole thing! Copy copy! WOO!

Now, go to your Google calendar and scroll down a bit to “Other Calendars,” which is below “My Calendars.”

Click that wee teeny drop down box on the right and bring up this fine, fine menu:

Click “Add by URL,” since I gave you the URL above. (If you’re curious, URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator.)(The more you know! *shooting star*)

Drop the URL you copied into the box that looks just like this one:

Click “Add Calendar” and you should now have a spiffy DABWAHA calendar!

 

Mine is yellow, but you can click the dropdown box next to its name and change the color. Maybe in your mind, the DABWAHA is purple? Totally your call. Now you know when the voting starts and ends and when to drive from free Wi-Fi to free Wi-Fi adding up those crucial votes.

Sharing a calendar via URL might be a useful option if you’re coordinating a set of team practices and want to share the schedule, for example, or want to make sure everyone has a calendar of after school activities. We used to do a separate calendar for Hebrew school sessions, which at our former synagogue were twice weekly. I didn’t need all of them on my calendar, but I needed to know when they were – so they got their own calendar which I could display or hide as needed.

Now, I’m sure you saw “Browse Interesting Calendars.”

Ooooh, yes, let’s definitely do that!

Go back to “Other Calendars,” click the dropdown box and select “Browse Interesting Calendars.”

 

 

Those are The Fireworks of Interestingness, btw.

This is kind of a time suck so be warned! Well, it is for me.

Because there is SO MUCH IN THERE.

Holidays? Oh, yes, holidays.

As you may note, I’m subscribed to the Jewish holidays on my calendar because they are all lunar and they MOVE AROUND which is a nightmare to keep track of for me.

Also, the Jewish holidays, especially Rosh Hashanah and Passover, are either “early this year” or “late this year” but they have never, in all my (16) years of being Jewish, EVER been on time.

Anyway.

All you need to do is click “Subscribe,” and they’re added to the “Other Calendars” list on the main calendar page.

Here’s what mine looks like:

I don’t keep all of those visible at the same time. My eyes would cross even more than they already do. But I keep them available because it’s easy to click one calendar and look to note what phase of the moon it will be, or when the next US or Jewish holiday is.

And as for the various country holiday calendars, you’ll never miss a family holiday again, no matter where in the world your family is.

And, now that I think about it, that could be very useful for narrative timelines and identifying holidays for fiction writing, right?

But wait, there’s more!

Oh, yes. SPORTS. Be prepared to either run in horror or be tremendously excited or BOTH.

It’s not just the MLB in the US – there are nine different baseball league teams you can subscribe to.

And, here’s the best part: if you subscribe, it’s perennial. The schedule for each year, each season, will show up as soon as its updated. You don’t have to re-add it every year. It’s your subscription each season, every season, until you unsubscribe.

So let’s have a look, shall we?

Baseball! If you’d like to see what the schedule for a team looks like, click a league, then click “Preview” next to a team name. 

 

That’s a very important schedule! Let’s see what it looks like in a monthly view:

 

 

Aw, that’s cute! Little baseballs on game days! And if you click one?

 

 

All the data! And you can copy the individual games to your personal calendar, should you wish to follow the Pirates like one might follow the Grateful Dead.

The logos are just as cute for other sports – of course I had to grab some screenshots. LOOK!

 

There are Newport Gwent Dragons?! I’m entirely in favor of that!

(I was all excited for a moment until I realized that Newport, Wales, and Newport Pagnell are two different places, and my ancestors ran a grocery and made mustard in the latter Newport. I almost had an ancestral obligation to cheer on a team of rugby-playing dragons. So close!)

Cricket! The cricket!

 

So given the time difference, this might have already happened, or it’s happening now, or it will shortly, but either way, little red cricket balls on the calendar giving you the heads up.

Sports team calendars are pretty useful to have so you know when to expect crowds of people in your home, or when half the family will take off for the nearest television set.

Let’s take a look at some of the others:

 

Under the “More” tab, there are days of the year, Hebrew calendars, phases of the moon, sunrise and sunset times, and several others. Useful information to have access to at a single click!

Your calendar can have as much or as little information as you need, and you can manage that information using different subscribed calendars and choosing when to make them visible. 

Next week, I’ll be covering common mistakes (including one I made – OOPS) and tips to make your calendar even more useful, including some external websites that work with Google Calendars. 

---

 

I hope you’re enjoying this series. If you’d like to receive the new You’re So Organized entries directly into your email inbox, we can do that!