I admit to never having been attracted to a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant,
not the High School version of the acronym: Public Displays of Affection).
I have too many friends who check out of real life and start dinking with their
PDA every time they need to consider a scheduling question. I still use a
small paper calendar. Sometimes I buy it but most years I just use the the calendar
my dentist gives away free. However, now that I have teenagers and in particular a
girl teen with a very active social life and college applications with complex
scheduling requirements, we are moving to an on-line family calendar.
Last weekend, after yet another tiresome “you scheduled what? when?” family discussion,
we all agreed to try out Google Calendar.
So far, this means I am now updating Google Calendar in addition to maintaining
my portable paper calendar and also the electronic calendar I use at work. I may
figure out how to merge my 3 calendars if Google Calendar works well enough.
My experiences this week with Google Calendar:
- Problems:
- We are still unable to make my daughter’s calendar entries show up on mine.
We have played with and tested the permissions every way we can think of.
My husband and I can see each other’s entries fine. From the FAQ, this seems
to be a known bug with Google Calendar. I am entering her events on my calendar
until this gets sorted out. - I dislike only scheduling on the 1/2 hour rather than in finer time increments.
There may be a way to schedule more finely that I haven’t figured out yet. - The printed monthly version has such small letters and descriptions are so truncated as to be hardly usable.
- Entries take too much time and thought (usability needs work) – I have to enter What and then click “edit event details” to enter dates and times. Unlike my electronic calendar at work, “Repeats” means creating a series of events rather than one event that
spans more than one day – this was confusing. I am still trying to enter a
repeating event on the last Friday of each month, rather than the 4th Friday.
- We are still unable to make my daughter’s calendar entries show up on mine.
- Working Well:
- The “Christian Holidays” and “U.S. Holidays” automatic entries are wordy but convenient. It is odd but interesting to see religious holidays from non-Episcopal denominations.
- I like being able to assign colors to each person sharing calendar entries.
- Even while we are still entering basic information like birthdays and weekly
activities, it is handy for everyone in the family to be able to see one web-based
calendar rather than checking in personally. - Update response time is good.
Seeing the entire family calendar in one place makes me feel overscheduled.
Next Tuesday, for example in addition to regular work meetings, the family
calendar already shows:
- It is the Feast of Christ the King (for Catholics).
- My daughter is off school.
- We have conferences with my daughter’s teachers, 8-11 a.m.
- My son’s Foods class is giving a Thanksgiving party for family members, 2-3 p.m.
- I am holding a SEED phone-in call 5-6 p.m.
Eeek!
KatysBlog 
I’ve been toying with Google Calendar to, and have tested some current applications for synchronizing to my Palm-OS based PDA.
Some comments on your findings:
“schedule fine tuning”: enter the time manually, use 24 hour or append am/pm where appropriate.
refine “edit event details”, in the small ‘create event’ box (click at the top of the day) enter a descriptive text: “19:05 to 22:00 theater Annie at Basingstoke”… The time and and location (where) is entered in the calendar correctly 🙂
I’ve yet to add Birthdays and the likes, for which I intend to create a separate calendar which all the family can add to and then we can hide/reveal it as we like too!