Google Calendar Tips: Adding Interesting Calendars to your Google Calendar

(Like Week Number, Day of the Year, or Holidays)

CREATED 2014-01-20

Follow Justin Gale on Google + (https://plus.google.com/+JustinGale)

or his blogs at http://justingale.com

Background:

Google calls the process “..adding interesting calendars…” I call it adding necessary or useful calendars and information to your Google Calendar, that you may not have been aware were out there.

If you use the basic calendar that Google gives you, you start with a blank sheet, and add your own items.  This works for the most part, but many of us work in environments where it is important for Manufacturing, Finance, and Sales/Reporting to be aware of the numeric day of the year (ie. Feb 1, 2014 is day 32) or the current “week number” from 1 to 52.  Google also provides a nice option to add/view Public Holidays - in our own country or different countries.

Google’s Official Support link on the topic:

https://support.google.com/calendar/answer/37098?hl=en

Justin’s Working Example - Adding Week Number:

In this document, I will walk you through adding the Week Number calendar to your Google Calendar, and also show the results of turning on a holiday calendar and how it would display in your web-view of Google Calendars.

The first thing is to go into your Google Calendar with a web-browser (like chrome), then look for the drop-down by “Other calendars” for the option “Browse Interesting Calendars”

This will bring up a tabbed view of calendars you can add/subscribe to in the topics of Holidays, Sports, and More.  Holidays is a pretty long list of Holidays in different countries.  Sports is sporting schedules for Baseball, Basketball, Cricket, Football, Hockey, Rugby, and Soccer.  The More tab is the one we are interested for this example.

On this tab, you will notice several potentially interesting calendars like Contacts’ Birthdays, and Day of the Year.  I would like to walk through adding Week Numbers though, so please click the Subscribe option to add it to your Google Calendar.

By subscribing, it has added a small indicator to your Google Calendar to show you the current week:

Finally, by playing with the color/toggle, you can view things like a holiday calendar and day of the week calendar overlayed on you own Google Calendar:

I hope that helps you realize just a little more of the potential that exists with Google Calendar!