Kobi Pinhasov

In my opinion one of the overlooked features in Google Calendar is the ability to receive notifications about upcoming events to your mobile phone by SMS. And all this – for FREE (well it depends on your carrier. My carrier does not charge me for received messages – only for those that I send).

The following is a detailed explanation of how to start using it right now. It will work for Google Apps users as well.

How to set it up

Navigate to your Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar).

• Click on the Settings menu item at the right top corner of the page.
• Click on the Mobile Setup option

• Specify correct values for Country and Phone number (including country + area code)
• Click on the Send Verification Code button
• Check your phone for new incoming SMS messages (for me it took less than 5 seconds)
• The received code put at the field named Verification code
• Click on the Finish setup button

That’s it. You can use this feature right now.

Example

Let’s try something out. Create an new event (click on Create event menu item on the left). Give it some title, set its start time to occur in about 4 minutes and look at the Options section. There you can add several reminders for this event – Email, Pop-up, SMS. Choose SMS option for first reminder and set it to one minute. Click on the Save button. In about 2-3 minutes you will get a notification about this event.

Make it default

For each calendar you can specify its notification preferences. For instance, you night want to receive SMS reminders for each newly added event. To do this, click on the Settings – Calendars.

You will see a list of your calendars (My calendars section). For each one you have a link-like button named Notifications. Click on it. You will be presented will the following page:

In this page you can set up your default reminders. You can have more than one (Email/SMS).

I find this feature very useful. It’s very handy that you can get SMS alerts about your upcoming events when you do not have access to your calendar.

I hope you will find it useful as well.

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• View your national holidays in Google Calendar

Today during my work in Google Calendar I’ve stumbled upon a new feature added to it that allows you to view your national holidays in your calendar. You’re presented with a long list of various holidays that you can subscribe to.

How to set it up

Click on the Settings menu option at the top-right corner of the page. Click on the tab named Calendars. At the Other Calendars section click on the link named Browse interesting calendars. You will be presented with a list of different calendars: national/religious holidays, sports and much more. Each calendar can be previewed and subscribed to.

Once you’ve clicked on the subscribe button the chosen calendar will be added to your calendars list. All the events from this calendar will be available for you. Each calendar has it’s own color and you can easily choose your own color for holidays. For example, you can specify that all holidays will appear in Red color. This way it will look different from the rest of your appointments and even tasks.

Check out all the available calendars. For example, the tab named More will list you some very useful calendars – like your contact’s birthdays and events.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find a way to specify alerts/notifications for such events.

So, go ahead and try it and I’m sure you will find it as a pretty useful feature.

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