It's probably challenging enough to keep your life organized as is with a full work schedule, keeping your home, spending time with family, errands, social occasions, and so much more. Add your kid's schedule into the mix, and you see your open time slots dwindling away. In between all of that, you want to be able to schedule a game with your gaming friends' who might have busy schedules of their own. Google Calendar to the rescue!
Google Calendar is a free service that only requires a Google Account, which we created in the previous article. To get to it, simply Google "google calendar." Google really makes this too easy for us.
Uses for Google Calendar
The first thing you're probably asking is "How does Google Calendar help my gaming?" Given the inconsistent nature of most adults' schedules, there are a number of benefits.
- Your gaming group can share view-only access to their personal calendars (or hide the details by sharing only the free/busy information) with the rest of the gaming group, spouses, friends, coworkers, etc.
- You can create multiple calendars each with different types of appointments to share with different social circles.
- You can grant various levels of permissions to others over a shared common calendar (i.e. - make changes to events, manage sharing, and see all event details).
- You can color code and overlay multiple calendars including yours and any calendars shared by others by simply clicking on those calendars in the list to the right.
- You can keep family members in the loop with regards to your gaming schedule.
This last one is more important than it seems. Being the busy individuals that we are, it's sometimes easy to forget what's going on and when. How many times has your significant other been caught off guard because you were getting ready for your game session? If you share your calendar with the individual, or better yet, have permissions to copy the event to their calendar (yes, you can copy an event from one calendar to another with a click of a mouse), you can keep them informed of your schedule. This could include nights when you plan to prep for your game.
OK, so you opened up Google Calendar for the first time, and are greeted with a welcome message and a form asking for some details such as name and timezone. Go ahead and put in the necessary information based on your own preferences. Once you've submitted the information, you'll be presented with your empty calendar.
At this point, you can either import an iCal file from your existing calendar, or just start from scratch. If you don't know how to export and iCal file, read the Help for the appropriate application; Google Calendar's Help will instruct you how to import the file. I'll leave that up to you so that I can continue with the rest of the article.
Creating Events
Next, let's look at the anatomy of an event. Creating an event is ridiculously easy. There's a Quick Add feature that lets you type in a description of an event and will resolve the information into event details. For example, "Eberron Campaign at 8pm on Friday" will automatically create a new event titles Eberron Campaign and schedule it for 8 pm on the closest future Friday.
Once the event is created, you can double-click on it to change the details. Note that you can also click and drag it or resize it to change the scheduled time and date.
Editing Events
The details in a Google Calendar event are somewhat impressive. You have the obvious options such as What, When, and Where, but you also get to select on which calendar you want the event to appear, enter a Description, add Guests, and set Reminders.
When allows for Repeats, which means you can set recurring scheduled game sessions, even if you're group meets every first Friday of the month. Play around with this feature to become familiar with it. If you heavily use calendaring tools at work, you'll have no problem figuring this out.
Where is perhaps one of the coolest features. If you type in the address to the location of your next gaming session, Google Calendar will automatically insert a link to a Google Map pinpointing the location. If you're inviting someone who isn't familiar with how to get to the location, they can call up directions from Google Maps instantly.
Inviting Guests
Remember when we added the contact information for the members of your gaming into your Google Contacts? This is yet another place where having done that comes in handy. When you click "Add guests," you can either choose from a list of your contacts or simply start typing either their names or email addresses. Google Calendar will offer suggestions as you type; selecting the entry with the arrow keys and pressing enter is about as easy as that gets. The permissions for the guests are entirely up to you.
When the recipients receive the invitation, they'll see all of the details, including the description, the map to the location, and a set of links -- Yes, Maybe, and No -- for responding to the appointment. When the recipient responds, they can indicate if any guests are coming, add a note, add additional guests if you allowed them, and set their own reminders. This is all assuming they use Google Calendar, too. Why wouldn't they?!
After the event has been sent, the organizer can follow up with guests via the "Email Guests" link integrated within the event.
Embedding a Calendar on a Web Page
This is perhaps one of the cooler features in Google Calendar. In the calendar settings, you'll see an option to embed the calendar on a web page along with some customization options. To embed the calendar into a web page, simply copy and paste the HTML. Below is an example of a calendar that I sized to 440 x 380, included a U.S. Holidays calendar, and defaulted to an Agenda view. In the future, we'll see how we can pull this into other Google services such as Google Sites, Blogger, or iGoogle.
Notice the message about not having permission to see one of the calendars? That's because I didn't share The Dice of Life personal calendar, but attempted to include it in the customization. I chose to leave it that way so that if you come across the same error, you'll know why.
That pretty much covers the most important parts of Google Calendar. There is one small feature I didn't cover, but it's not really related to calendaring per se. For homework, take a look at the new Tasks feature in Google Calendar, and post a comment here about how you can leverage Tasks for your own gaming or personal needs. Make sure you explore the details in Tasks; there's a lot more there than what you see initially. Note that Tasks also appears in Gmail and iGoogle, and it holds the same data.
Next: Gaming with Google Docs, Part 1
Learn how to use Google Docs to create and share campaign documents with your group such as GM/player collaboration on writing PC backgrounds, distributing handouts, and tracking experience points for players.
2 comment(s):
Sweet. I had no idea you could embed a calendar within a web page.
And that's... One to Grow On. :)
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