One of the biggest challenges I have right now is knowing all the events that are going on in my family. I have two 16 year olds taking driver’s ed, going to swim meets and swim work outs, and then the occasional sleep over or birthday party. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could find a way to share a calendar with my wife? Something we could both see on our iPhones or her Mac (Outlook for Mac)/my PC.
So the problem is there are a number of them out there. Outlook online (Hotmail), Gmail, and Yahoo. I haven’t really messed with any of them, except for Gmail a little bit. I need to be able to set it up so both my wife and I can add events and see what is coming up on all our devices, etc.
I think Gmail might be the best option. I haven’t really done much with Hotmail over the years, but I know it just got a big upgrade in the last year or so. I probably wouldn’t even try Yahoo. Does Apple have a free service? If anyone has tried any of these, I’d love to know your thoughts.
I’ve had the most success with Google calendar for sharing events with my wife. Works on iPhones and I believe you can use Outlook to subscribe to the shared Google calendar as well.
I was using Gmail for my personal calendar but recently shifted back to my Hotmail account for that purpose after I switched to using Outlook heavily. Because as that link says, “See your Google Calendar in Outlook” - you can’t easily add events to a GMail calendar in Outlook or iOS without third party add-ons, Google Apps for Business, or opening up the Google website.
Hotmail calendar works seamlessly with Outlook (obviously), and natively in iOS, including adding of events. Admittedly I have not used the sharing functionality, but I understand the only issue with that is that you each need to have Microsoft accounts for it to work.
Ah, this is helpful. I just set up trail runs in Google and the one on IOS. I was wondering if there were any gotchas like ability to edit. Fortunately my wife and I both have Microsoft accounts already set up.
Google Calendar Sync does still work (link) which does allow for one or two way syncing with Outlook. I just re-set it up again yesterday. However, if that article is correct, it will stop working on 8/1/14. Kind of hoping it will be overlooked, because it’s worked really well for me over the years, but I’m not very optimistic.
My wife & I rely heavily on shared calendars and use Google. It works great on the web interface, from our iPhones, etc. Outlook integration isn’t great though, so I ended up buying this calendar program called VueMinder. Really well designed - we’re very happy with it.
If TimElhajj is using Microsoft Outlook and iOS, the best option is clearly Microsoft’s calendar. Everything works out of the box and you don’t need to buy/install anything extra.
I created a Gmail account specifically for a family shared calendar. We add it to our devices but only choose to sync calendar info. I don’t use Outlook for my personal stuff, but as mentioned, if that’s a priority, use an Outlook.com address and add it as an Exchange/Activesync account to your devices.
Well, it looks like there is no way to use a shared calendar from Outlook for Mac 2011 without an Exchange server. :( I can set up our iPhones, but not Outlook on the Mac. So annoying.
My wife and I use google calendar for this. We are both gmail users, and don’t use Outlook at all. I really enjoy the sms alerts built into the Reminder functions. It also sends me an sms whenever the shared calendar is updated.
Couple questions. If I get a MS Outlook meeting invite, is there a way to forward that to another person without notifying the original sender? It would be great for example for me to send evening meeting requests to my wife.
I guess same question but more generally, I find I need Outlook for work so that others can see my schedule. But I don’t know how to update my own Google Calendar efficiently from outlook. If I forwarded the meeting request the the original sender gets notified.
Speaking of Outlook, this “suggested meetings” feature is comically bad. It’s bad enough that it’s constantly suggesting spurious meetings, but it doesn’t even work properly when a meeting is actually being suggested in the email. I just got an emailed meeting invite which spelled out time, date and location. Outlook suggested a meeting on the wrong date, at the wrong time, with the wrong person, and asked me where it would be.
