Showing Your Google Calender inside Your Microsoft Outlook: Using 365 to See a "Unified" Calendar

Alright, good morning everyone. This is Randy Dean coming to you live from East Lansing, Michigan. And what I want to do today is share with you a very quick YouTube tip. Did you know that you can actually show your Google Calendar inside of your Microsoft Outlook, both the local client version, which used to be called Outlook 16, and the web version? And what's interesting about this, it'll actually also work with the apps on your phone. Moon. Uh, sort of a fun little thing. Now I'm gonna try to do this whole thing today in a single take. So, uh, as I'm doing this, what I recommend you might want to do is watch the whole video once just to see the whole process, and then if, as this becomes a new habit for you, come back and be ready to watch it a second time and hit the pause button. Uh, because, um, what you can do is hit pause every step of the way, and then you can basically set it up so you can see your Google Calendar right inside your Microsoft Outlook. Alright, so let's do this. What I'm gonna do first is I'm gonna jump out of here and I'm gonna go into my Google Calendar first. So let's go up to Google Calendar. And what I want to do first is I basically want to come over and hit Settings. So when I go into Settings in the calendar, it looks like the gear, hit Settings, and what'll happen is it's gonna bring this up and you're gonna come down here to Import and Export. And what you're gonna wanna do is see where it says export here. You will page down and come to the bottom, and there's a button right here where you hit click export. Now, notice it says creating export file. This might take a while. And it's building the export file as we speak. And it's building a zip file. Now the zip file has been built. Now what you want to do is come over here, click on this, and come up and hit Open. Now you can see that you've got your zip file inside your Downloads folder on your PC, and one of the folder— one of the files that's in here is this one right here, which is your iCalendar file. Now if you take a look, it shows you, uh, the size of the file and, um, all of that information. Now what I recommend that you do is just take this file, pick it up, and drag it over to your Documents folder. And I, I was practicing this before I did the session, so I'm going to replace the file in destination because they have the same name. And now that you've got that in your Documents folder, now what you can do is you can come up to your Microsoft Outlook. Now let's go into Outlook, and what you're going to do is go to your File and you can hit open and export. Now what you're going to do is come down to import/export and import an iCalendar. Next. And now you go to your Documents folder and let's see, I think this is the folder right here. Yep, 6/23/20. Click on that and hit OK. Do you wanna open this calendar as a new calendar? Yes, open as new. Now watch what this does. It creates a new calendar down here called Other Calendars and it brought in my name from my, um, account. So we're gonna let this thing create. Now notice that what it's doing is it's going through the entire listing of all of the events and items that were in my Google Calendar, and it's basically creating a copy as a new calendar inside my Microsoft Outlook. Now, this is a copy. It's not your active Google Calendar out on the web. And what that means is you can see it in your Outlook, but you're not really interacting with it in your Outlook. And if you add items to the Google Calendar view inside your Outlook, those items will not show on your actual Google Calendar out on the internet. So basically, it's just a way to see your Google Calendar inside your Microsoft Outlook, but you should still be making changes, additions, edits to the actual Google Calendar in Google. Now, what it's doing right now, which is interesting, if you take a look down here at the bottom, look, it's pulling in all 5,888 items from my calendar. So it takes a few minutes for this whole thing to run in. But as you can see, it's not very long. It's a couple minutes, um, you know, and I bet you a lot of people won't even have a calendar that has as much stuff as mine. But if you'll notice over to the side, it's populating items as I'm going along, and you'll see the calendar over here to the side making little changes here and there as we go. All right, so I'm going to let this process finish, but it is bringing in this calendar. It's got the brand new calendar. Now I want to show you something super cool. Notice that it opened up And notice that I, I'm looking here at the first week of June. If you look over to the side, I have an event that's here inside this Google Calendar. Now, in order to show this, take a look under my calendar. I have my regular Outlook calendar open, and when I created the new calendar, it automatically clicked and opened this. But I could deselect this and close the Google Calendar. But if I click it again and reopen it, it's going to show it again. And now here's what's sort of cool about this. Take a look at this. Notice I have this, this little work and virtual meetings webinar that I did for one of my clients. It's not showing on my Outlook calendar. It is in my Google Calendar. Now watch what you can do, which is really cool. Simple little drag and drop. Click on this item, hold the click, drag it over here to your Outlook calendar, drop it. Now what happens is that drag and drop option allows you to make copies from your Google Calendar right into your Outlook calendar.. Now what I've decided to do with this little process is basically whenever I'm making a lot of changes out of my Google Calendar and/or maybe about once a week if I'm not, I just do this process I'm showing you online to make it simple to show you, show myself what's going on in my Google Calendar while I'm working in my Outlook calendar. See, I'm using Outlook primarily for work. I'm using Google for work and some personal stuff. And I want to be able to see both. Like, like, here's a good example, uh, that's my mom and dad's anniversary. Well, I click that over and move that into my Outlook calendar too. And notice it gives you the chance— do you want to copy the entire series or just the selected occurrences? Yeah, let's copy the entire series. Now I've got that in there too. And so what I can do is utilize this capability to share information from my Google Calendar without having to do some sophisticated, tricky You know, open up Google, copy the information, or remember the information, even worse, likely for mistakes, drag, open up a new item in Outlook and then create it. No, just bring in a copy and then drag over the stuff you need from your Google Calendar into your Outlook calendar. Now you can drag stuff back. Watch this. I'm going to drag this back over here, but here's the thing. I just made a copy of this phone call with one of my clients. Here's the thing you gotta understand, that will not show on my Google Calendar because this calendar is not interacting with the web calendar. It's a download. So you're just using this as a way to see your Google Calendar in your Outlook and possibly copy items from your Google Calendar into your Outlook in a quick, easy process. So it's pretty slick, but now wait, there's a bonus kicker here. Check this out. You can then come down here and click on your Office icon, you know, which opens up your Microsoft 365 account. And inside the Microsoft 365 account, you have both the Outlook app, which is the web version of Outlook, and the calendar item. And honestly, if you go into the Outlook app— let me show you something here— you go into Outlook app in your Microsoft Outlook, it's going to bring up your web version of your Outlook, Outlook.com. Maybe it's taking a second. All right. And it defaults, it goes into your mail. But check this out. Down here, if you click on the calendar icon inside of this, watch what happens to the icon here at the top. It opens up your calendar. And let's show you this. Now it's got the calendar icon. Now take a look at this little widget look right here, you can actually shortcut that whole process by just clicking on this right here, which also opens up your calendar in the same view in your Microsoft. So, uh, it's just a shortcut. You can either use the Outlook.com app or you can go directly to your calendar. But here's what's sort of fun. Now take a look at this. I'm going to go back to that first week of June because you already saw what was in there, and I want to show you something that's pretty cool. Here's the information. Now notice down here, other calendars. It's got my Google Calendar as part of this list. I click this button and what happens is now it's going to bring in my Google stuff into this one view. So what basically you can do is if you know you've just imported that copy of your Google Calendar, you can then open up the app view of your calendar and see both your work and your personal all fully integrated, which is super cool. And I did check, if you use the Outlook.com app on your phone, iPhone or Android, and you click on the calendar option inside of there, you can have the exact same check button on there. You click that button and you can see a fully integrated calendar there too. So basically it makes it so that you can have a work calendar, which is work only, a personal calendar, which is personal only. But you can now take them and see them all at once. That's slick. And it might save you from making that critical mistake of booking a work meeting at the time that you have a dinner meeting scheduled with your spouse or significant other and avoid that problem completely. All right, so I hope that you found this fun. Like I said, I went through that fairly quickly. What I'd recommend that you might want to do is watch this video a second time and be ready to hit your pause button every time I take one of these steps so you can replicate this entire process and practice getting this in. Like I said, I do this like once a week, um, and sometimes more if I know I'm making a lot of changes. So let's go ahead and finish up this quick video. And so what I want to do is say thank you for your time. Once again, this is Randy Dean. If you'd like to learn more about me and my programs, including my recently up— updated full-length online streaming programs that are available on my website, randaldean.com. Click on the e-learning tab. You can just go out there and check that out. If you enjoyed this video and you'd like to see more, please subscribe to my YouTube channel and give this video a like. That really helps with them being seen by more people. And a little bonus for you for taking the time to watch all the way to the end. I actually have a whole series of what I call my little productivity PDF tip sheets. They're little, little electronic PDF files. They cover things like time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, smartphone/tablet usage, and related other topics. Some of them which link through to my YouTube channel so that you can see more of my video tips without having to search through my entire catalog of videos. So if you'd like to get those, just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com, and put YouTube PDF in that subject line, and I'll send you out that entire list of bonus materials so that you can continue to enhance your productivity and capabilities. And please do keep me in mind. I do live events once the coronavirus outbreak decides to subside and I can travel normally again, as well as live webinar events. So, uh, hopefully we can maybe work together sometime in the future for you or your professional group, association, or company. Thanks. Have a great day.