gmail and google calendar

Factual Questions
1

We were all required to get work-only gmail accounts this morning. I’ve never really used gmail because I find its interface messy and unintuitive.* But I have one now.

One of the reasons they wanted us all to use gmail was so that it would be easy to sync up our calendars with each other, or anyway, that’s what they seemed to think would be an advantage.

But I’m looking at my gmail interface, and I’m looking at my google calendar interface, and I don’t see any way to get directly from one to the other. No button anywhere at gmail shows me my calendar–and vice versa. Am I just missing something here? Are they integrated in a way I’m not seeing?

*Plug for outlook.com, which is what I told them to use, but no.

2

It’s not like Outlook (the desktop client…I’m not familiar with Outlook.com but I assume maybe it’s the same) where your calendar is a part of your email client.

Instead, having a Gmail account means having a Google login, and you use your Google login to do access a ton of stuff - not limited to Gmail and Calendar. It’s your YouTube login, your Google+ login, your Google Drive login, your uh…I dunno, all sorts of shit I don’t use.

Google doesn’t seem to think that your Calendar and your email should be related, any more than they think your Calendar and YouTube should be related. The only thing you’ll probably see related across all of those different apps is Google+ (their answer to Facebook).

3

In the upper right (by your login name) on both GMail and Calendar is a button that looks like a block of tiles. Clicking that shows a handful of Google apps, including Calendar and GMail. That lets you switch between them quickly. It also includes News, Youtube, Google+, etc…

4

Also available is Google Drive which is a good way to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, etc.

5

I’m pretty sure that, when an e-mail mentions a date, the date is a link that you can click to add it to your calendar. You don’t see an interface usually because usually there’s nothing to interface to.

6

Just open another tab with your calendar.

One thing that you can do from gmail is add events to your calendar directly from emails. You can also set up pop ups for calendar events.

Gmail is pretty customizable. I use some crazy multiple inbox system that is amazing, but it takes a few minutes to set up.

7

Ugh oh yeah and then that stupid three-dots-in-a-tiny-rectangle thing that blemishes every email longer than two lines.

But the adding events from within an email thing sounds good. I just tried sending myself an email with a date in it but it doesn’t show up as a link. Is that not how you do it?

8

Got it to work by sending an email from a different account.

9

If you ever need to email your co-workers a date, the better way to do it would be to just make a Google Calendar invite. Create the event in your GCal and on the right hand side you can invite any contact or contact group to the event. That way they’ll still get an email about it, they’ll immediately see it on their own gcals, they can individually RSVP to it, and if you change the event they’ll automatically be notified.