Google Calendar- Some Cons Discovered

Today I was dealing with my calendars at work, so it was natural that I wanted to see how these functioned on the Chromebook.

My main calendar for the past few years has been the one I share on my Macbook, my iPhone and my iPad.  The Apple Calendar app has been working for me fine for years.  I can share those calendars with my Outlook program on the PC, and share them with my Google Calendar.  I can also share my Google Calendar with Apple and Outlook.

For the most part, the calendars sync together well, and if I open one, the same information is there that is on the other calendars. (I believe that having too many devices can make calendars a problem.)

I discovered today that Google Calendar is slower at syncing than I would like.  I added a new event to my Apple calendar this morning and it still has not shown up on the calendar app late in the afternoon.  This is not always the case, sometimes an event shows up fairly quickly.  It's kind of random.

I did a quick search and based on a number of articles, many people are experiencing the same thing.  A Google event shows up almost immediately on the Apple calendar, but it may take up to 24 hours to see an iCal event on the Google Calendar.  The support pages are full of folks complaining about the slow sync of iCal events.  Many folks asked why there was no action by Google to remedy the problem.

One bold responder (not a Google employee) wrote on a forum: "It's a free app, get over it."

Sometimes you get what you pay for.  Free is good, but sometime it means that it has a little less quality or effectiveness than you would like.

Overall, I am pleased with Google Calendar and have found it to be very sophisticated, easy to do all kinds of things like invite folks to events, and share information with others.  One of my favorite features is how it integrates with my email to put events on the calendar, or notify Google Maps about appointments and the like.

So, for the money, it is one of the best calendar applications out there.  If you need everything to sync immediately with other calendars, you will probably be disappointed.

I will explore some of the other features of Google Calendar in a future post, but this was what was on my mind today.