GOOGLE'S IN ON YOUR PLANS.

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Author: Janowski, Davi's D.

Google Calendar (beta), Create private online calendars, share them with a group, or let everyone on the Web see what you have planned. Even add event buttons to events to your Web site!, Free go.pcmag.com/googlecalendarbeta $$$@@

UNLIKE THE YAHOO! ONLINE CALENdar, Google Calendar (beta) won't sync with your Outlook or Palm Desktop, but it excels at sharing calendars and coordinating schedules among Google and email account holders. Importing Outlook calendar entries is a multistep process that's a bit labor-intensive, so this service is most useful when you want to start a calendar from scratch or keep a shared one for specific purposes. You can easily import iCal and CSV formats, though, and I applaud the developers for using the open iCal and XML standards so that other open calendars can directly interact with Google's.

Your information resides online (you decide whether it's private), enabling access from any computer on the Net, but you can't work off-line or save your calendar locally. Adding entries is simple: Rather than fill in forms with meeting times and such, you just type a phrase or two and the application extracts the critical meeting info for display. It works pretty well, but not perfectly â€" it didn't, for example, know what to make of the time designations EST and PST. You can see multiple calendars you and others have created and shared, and you can assign different colors to entries from other people's calendars, which simplifies planning.

This newcomer doesn't, for now, provide features with enough power to woo you away from the free AOL, Microsoft, or Yahoo! online calendars, and its beta status is apparent. For example, I clicked on an entry assuming it would just open for editing; instead, the application eliminated a couple of days of the event. I expect to see improvements, though.

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By Davi's D. Janowski