News.blog: Google Calendar rocks!

My friends tease me every time I pull out my black, leather-bound date book to jot down an appointment. True, it weighs half a kilo and crowds my purse, but it also contains a notepad, address book, pen and a bevy of business cards.

Still, I've been waiting for something to nudge my scheduling into the digital era. So when Google Calendar was released last month, I saw my opportunity. I also decided to try the Web-based calendars from Yahoo and Microsoft to see how they compare.

Let me tell you, even for a calendar junkie like me, it hasn't been easy juggling three online calendars and my old-fashioned, paper date book for the past two weeks. That said, my attempt at calendar multitasking left me with a few clear thoughts, starting with the fact that marking appointments, or 'events' as they're called in the online world, turned out to be fairly straightforward on all three programs.

But Google, in my very unscientific test drive, won out. (Read a more technical look at the Google and Yahoo calendars, by CNET Reviews.) Google's had the best interface and the most interactive features of the three. But there's one big caveat, something that didn't bother me so much but could annoy other people, particularly on-the-go business users. While Google Calendar allows users to import from and export to Microsoft Outlook, it doesn't synchronise with Outlook or handheld devices. A Google product manager has said the company will offer that functionality in coming months.

First, some tech background: I used Firefox and sometimes Internet Explorer on a Windows-based PC and tested the calendaring feature in the Windows Live Mail beta rather than Hotmail, which it will eventually replace. On a side note, Microsoft is building a calendar feature into its pending next-generation operating system, Vista, which is due later this year.

Typically, a calendar user creates an appointment by clicking on a button to add or create a new 'event' and filling in blank spaces on a new page with details such as event type, day, time and location, and then clicking Save.

Google gives you several different ways to create new events without having to go through all those steps. One way is to click on a particular day and type in some details in a pop-up window, such as 'Triathlon in Napa'. After that, the program automatically creates the event. Another way is to click on a 'Quick Add' link, type in a few more specifics, such as 'Triathlon in Napa, Sunday 8 a.m.', and it will automatically create the event for that day.

Google also lets users easily change the day of an event once it's scheduled by dragging and dropping it on to a new day. The other calendars require people to open up the event details and change the date manually, which takes more time.

Google Calendar also was the easiest on the eyes, allowing me to choose from a broad palette of colours for different calendars. For instance, events that are work-related show up in turquoise, personal items are purple, birthdays are pink and travel is yellow. My nine different calendar views each sported different colours, giving the setup an exciting look, if I do say so myself. Google also has kept the interface simple and clean, with no ads (at least for now).

By contrast, Yahoo and Microsoft offered fewer colours to choose from and they both showed ads. Yahoo's interface seemed downright cluttered with ads and a random nature shot, which I could choose from a variety of such pictures. For me, that was distracting and an unnecessary waste of space. Yahoo automatically shows me the weather outlook for the day, which was helpful, if you trust those forecasts.

But Yahoo and Microsoft do have one leg up on Google. They synchronise with Outlook and mobile devices. Microsoft syncs with handhelds through Outlook, a representative said.

All three offer the ability to view the calendar in day, week and month modes by default. Yahoo and Microsoft also offer year views, and Google offers a 'next four days' view, which is arguably more useful than viewing the whole year without any events listed. Google has a unique and very handy display function that lets users highlight any number of days or weeks in a monthly calendar thumbnail on the left-hand side to change the main calendar display to show only those days. With Yahoo and Microsoft, users have to click an arrow to navigate through to the next day, week or month, which can be tedious.

Google also offers an agenda view that lets users see a running list of events on the calendar, and Microsoft offers separate views for tasks and for notes. Yahoo lets people create a list of tasks that are seen on the main calendar view on the left-hand side.

That seemingly small feature turned out to be very important to me. It's the digital equivalent to the yellow Post-it notes for ongoing tasks that I migrate through my print date book every week. And if you ever saw my desk, you'd understand how important Post-it notes are to me. They serve as a constant reminder of things I need to do, like train for the triathlon, renew my passport and take care of long overdue emails and phone calls. Having it easily viewable there every time I look at my calendar will, theoretically, improve the chances that I'll actually get those things done.