Living with 3 calendars.

Since returning to KPLU, I’ve struggled with my computer and other electronic devices. The computer was replaced while I was gone, with a Windows XP machine. I have a newer computer at home, running Vista and new software. And I also have an older Palm device that keeps my calendar and contacts. It’s been such a chore to get these devices all to sync together. In the process, I’ve been playing with online calendars, such as Google Calendar and WindowsLive Calendar.

What do I want? I want to be able to view the same calendar on all these different devices, at these different locations. And if I add an appointment, whether from home, or from work, or while away from my desk, it should be added to all the synchronized calendars.

You might think either, (a) give it up, Keith, computers are never that simple; or (b) that’s simple, just use blah-blah-blah software.

I can tell you, as a fairly savvy user (but not a “power user”), this has been quite an odyssey. I finally stumbled on a solution that seems to work – kind of. First, I tried three different Microsoft applications, all of them aimed at synchronizing Outlook. But, ultimately, if you want Outlook Online to work for you, it appears you need to be running something called Microsoft Exchange at work, and my workplace is not. Eventually I found that Google Calendar has a “sync” option. (This is kind of hidden in Google – not easy to find. I discovered it through a Microsoft Office discussion forum, where one of the users had struggled with the same problem and mentioned the Google solution.)

It’s not perfect. In the process of synchronizing my calendar at work, it duplicated a whole bunch of appointments, and then triplicated them when I added the sync at home. That’s annoying, but not fatal.

Otherwise, I’m still new at using it, and I’ll update this later to describe how it’s working.