- Google Calendar.
Such a valuable tool.
Today we're gonna take a look at things you
should know about managing your events
on Google Calendar,
on Dotto Tech.
(snapping)
(funky guitar music)
Steve Dotto here,
how the heck you doin' this fine day?
And today as the title of this video indicates,
our topic de jour is Google Calendars.
And I'm gonna show you about six different things
within Google Calendar,
that you may or may not know about.
If you do know about it and you're using,
good on you,
but most people aren't using a lot of these features.
And if you decide to embrace them,
Google Calendar becomes that much more
an efficient tool for you.
So let's just dive in and start poking around, shall we?
And the first place that we're gonna go,
is we're gonna create a new event.
Of course events are really what we set up
in Google Calendar.
It's what tells us what we're doing,
and where we have to be,
it's what makes Google Calendar valuable to us.
Now when you click on create event,
now I'm in the web version on the desktop version
here right now,
not on my mobile version.
But when you create a new event,
it brings you into this mini editor,
this mini event editor that allows you
to quickly add an appointment
or a phone call that you have to make
or something like that.
And you can add some extra parameters to it.
I don't wanna start here though.
Instead I wanna click on more options,
and take a look at the full event screen,
where we can take a look at all the options
that are built into this event editor.
Because this is where a lot of kinda sneaky power
is built in to Google Calendar.
And let's begin right down here
in the description field.
Now here in the description field,
you can add formatted text.
That text can be everything from notes
about the appointment that you're planning,
especially if it's a solo appointment,
if it's just something--
reminders that you need to add to yourself.
But if it's team meeting,
if it's an event for multiple people,
everybody who's registered for this,
everybody who's accepted this appointment,
will have access to these notes as well.
So say you're booking a meeting with your team,
and you wanted to put a meeting agenda,
you can type in the meeting agenda here.
And then you can start adding different notes
to that agenda.
You can add things like...
Say we're planning an event.
So there's going to be a location,
we're gonna have to pick the location,
a list of potential speakers,
(keyboard clacking)
what we're gonna do about catering,
let's look at available dates.
(keyboard clacking)
And you can go on and on with different agenda items
for your meeting.
Now look here.
We can attach different things.
If we have say a document that has a list
of different topics that we've already filled out,
we can attach that and that document can come
from any of our resources.
It can come from Google Drive,
or you can upload it from your computer.
So you can add different resources.
Again.
If you're just booking an event for yourself,
or you're booking an appointment for yourself,
you might wanna attach things,
but if there's multiple people involved,
they all will then have access
to all of the assets for the meeting
that they need.
You can convert this into a bullet list,
or into a ordered list.
You can also incorporate web links.
You can format the text,
make it a bold, italic, et cetera
To make it look a little prettier.
But all of these notes are available to everybody
that's booked into this meeting.
That is tip one,
is use the events description field
to fill in all sorts of associated information
for the event that you're planning.
Next up let's look over into the guest area here.
Where you can add additional people to your meeting.
And again if it's the scenario
where you're gonna be setting up a meeting
with your team,
you can add individuals from your team
to the meeting here.
And Google Calendar will automatically send invitations
to those individuals,
inviting them to the meeting,
and if they say that they're available in the email,
we've all received those invitation emails,
if they say they're available
it'll automatically populate their calendar
and let the meeting host know
that those people are available.
You can give the different members
of the meeting permission
to actually modify the event details,
or to invite other people into it,
or to see who else is coming.
So you've got a lot of control here.
And any time you make a change.
Once you've saved this event,
any time you make a change to anything
within the event,
everybody can be notified that's on that list.
It becomes like a distribution list
that you can then notify people of those changes.
You always have the option to let everybody know
about any changes or not.
So if you're just adding some agenda items,
you might not want to let everybody know,
but if you're changing the time
of the meeting,
then you want to let everybody know of course.
So allowing Google Calendar to help you manage the attendees
for different events that you are planning,
is a really great way to maximize the use
of Google Calendar.
(claps) (hands rubbing together)
Next up,
oh this one is very cool.
This is called Find a Time.
If you are booking a meeting with multiple people,
you know as well as I know,
how difficult it is to get everybody available
for a meeting at a certain time.
And Google Calendar has this feature built in
called Find a Time.
Now Find a Time tends to work best--
actually really only works best--
when you're in an environment
where you got everybody that's using Google Calendar,
so that Google Calendar can then resource their calendars
to see what their availability is.
It basically goes out
and crowd sources everybody's availability
and lets you know when they're available
so that you can actually book a meeting
that people will actually have time to attend.
As a result of that,
it works best if you are in an environment
where you're using G Suite
or everybody's on Google Calendar.
Now I don't actually use this feature
with our team.
We're too small a team to make it really effective.
And we don't all share our Google Calendars back and forth.
So it's not a feature that I use,
but I found a really great resource video.
It's from a teacher in California.
Josh Harris is his name.
And he's got a lot of nice little tutorial videos,
and as I was looking for a good example
of Find a Time,
somebody demoing it,
I found this video that he posted,
I'll have links below to it,
but if we go in and take a look,
take a look at his B-roll here,
you can see that he is showing us how he can
within his team environment,
he can see other people's calendars,
and he can designate time within those calendars,
in order to invite individuals to a meeting.
And he's able to then browse through
and find an appropriate time.
This visual representation
of what people's time commitments,
is a big bonus.
Especially--
well really only--
if you are in a team environment
where you're all using Google Calendar.
But you can set up a team environment
for yourself,
say with your family if you choose to,
by having you all share your calendars
with each other.
If the calendars are shared,
you can see the appointments,
and you can make Find a Time work for you.
Well thanks to Josh for creating some really nice tutorials.
Especially for the educational community.
As I mentioned we will have links below
to his channel so you can check it out
if you're interested.
Next thing I wanna show you is,
I wanna show you the location services
that are built in.
So I'm gonna go back in and create another event here.
When I click in the location field,
the location services in Google Calendar,
really integrate the entire ecosystem
that is the Google ecosystem.
And it integrates Google Maps into our calendar app.
And this is one of the best features.
So let's say I'm booking a meeting
with my team maybe for Halloween.
And so we're gonna plan a Halloween party meeting.
So we're gonna choose a Halloween
Halloween Party (keyboar clacking)
Meeting.
Where we're gonna plan our Halloween party.
And we'll choose it for the day before Halloween
because we're last minute as we do these things.
And now when I start to add a location,
this is so cool!
Now my team of course is spread around the entire world,
so it's gonna be difficult for us all to get together.
But what if we all wanted to meet at WeWork
in New York City.
New...
(keyboard clacking)
There we go.
So here we've got addresses of WeWork in New York City.
See how it comes up when you just start typing
in the name?
Type in a restaurant,
type in a hotel,
type in a conference center,
and it's going to find it in Google Maps.
And when we click on this,
it then puts the address in to the event itself.
So if you're going to any physical location,
you can just type in the direct address here,
or you can just type in the name,
and Google Maps will find it.
Now why is this so cool?
Why do you hear me getting all excited about this?
Well watch what happens when we create that event.
Well first of all,
one of the things (laughing)
about google is it finds a little header graphic,
and it recognizes that it said Halloween party,
and so it put in a little Halloween graphic,
and you'll notice that it does that
for things like dentist and other things.
But I'm gonna just take you in quickly.
And show you on my smart phone,
what happens when the Google ecosystem shares
this calendar information
with Google Calendars in mobile.
And it gets very cool at this point
because let's go into calendars,
and it should have already synced up,
and there it is.
It's synced up here,
and if you take a look,
it's chosen as the header image
here in my agenda here in my smart phone,
it's chosen the graphic from the WeWork location.
And if I was happened to be in New York,
and was driving to that meeting,
Google Maps would interact with me
and give me the directions to get there,
or give me transit instructions to get there, et cetera.
So by putting in,
and by using the location field
in Google Calendar,
you then get all of the assets
and benefits of Google Maps to help you get
to your meeting on time,
and get to the right location,
and help everybody else that's involved in that meeting,
get to that location as well.
I love that integration
between Google Maps and Google Calendar.
Let's go on and let's take a look at the next area
that you can use to help you become more efficient.
And that is by intelligently managing your notifications.
This is when you're gonna be notified
of upcoming meetings and upcoming appointments
in your calendar.
And Google Calendar will notify you
through a variety of different mechanisms.
If we click here,
we can see that I can ask it to email me,
notification of an event,
or to use the notification tool in your smart phone
or on your computer.
Your online notifications.
To let you know.
And I've got mine set to just use notifications
to let me know 10 minutes before a meeting.
But if you are the sort of person
that needs a little bit more advanced warning,
you might choose a different time frame,
and if you're more email centric,
you might ask it to email you notification
of a meeting say 45 minutes before,
or a half an hour before,
if you often have to travel around.
So you can set up your different notification systems
to best suit your own work style.
Now if you have recurring events in your life,
you can set that up as well.
Using this repeat menu here,
this repeat feature,
that allows you to set up repeating events.
So say you always wanna work out every morning
at 8am and you don't want anything
to be booked between 8 and 9am.
You can set up a daily repeat
between 8 and 9am,
for your workout,
to block off that time so it's not accidentally booked
in any other calendar.
That nobody else takes that time,
or you don't accidentally book that time.
But this is far more customizable
than just that simple daily or weekly.
If you go into the custom menu here,
you can choose a day of the week,
say every Thursday or every--
let's say every third Thursday of the month,
you can set up a repeating event.
So for example I do that,
we have a YouTube meet up group
that meets I think on the third Wednesday
of every month.
Yeah it's the third Wednesday of every month.
So I set that up.
So even though the date of that repeating event
will change every month,
because the third Wednesday of the month
will be a different day in the month,
it still sets up the repeating event
so that I never miss having that booked
and blocked off in my calendar.
So you can set up these repeating events
to a very customizable level.
Before we leave today's demo,
I wanna show you two kind of ninja tips
that I really like,
that help me view my information more effectively.
You know when you are in Google Calendar.
And you've got the month view up,
sometimes you wanna dive down
and you wanna look at a week at a glance,
or a day at a glance view,
when you're in the web version of the calendar.
And typically speaking we just go over here
into the drop down menu and we choose
to change to week at a month,
week at a glance or the day at glance, et cetera.
But...
You notice here that there are little keyboard indications
that we can actually hit.
If we wanna view the day we can just hit D,
and it will change to day.
If we wanna hit W,
it will show us a week at a glance.
But that involves some hunting
and pecking around the keyboard.
There's another shortcut just using the number keys
on your computer keyboard.
So if you hit number one,
that shows you day at a glance.
Number two shows you week at a glance.
Number three shows you month at a glance.
Number four shows you work week.
Number five shows you the schedule view,
which is just a list of all of your appointments
so you can see what's coming up next,
but not based on a calendar.
So that's a really quick way
to source your information more effectively.
And speaking of that,
when I am on my smart phone,
this view here that I showed you earlier,
is the way that I like to use Google Calendar
on my smart phone.
And again,
if I click on the drop down menu on the side,
I can choose say a month at a glance on the phone,
which is ridiculous!
It's so tiny and it's so hard
to see anything that's happening.
So instead of looking at a day at a glance
or anything like that,
I prefer this schedule view.
The schedule view just shows you your booked appointments.
And so you can see what the next appointment is,
what the next thing is.
Which I find a far more effective way to use Google Calendar
on my smart phone.
And I think you will as well.
Now before we wrap up,
if you found today's video to be useful,
I have a suggestion for you.
Every week here at Dotto Tech,
we host something called Webinar Wednesday.
Which is a free tutorial webinar
where we dive deep into one aspect of productivity
or content creation.
Links will be below,
but I encourage you to join us
for a webinar Wednesday to edify yourself more
on the use of technology and where it fits in your life.
I hope you found this video today to be useful,
I do have a couple of favors to ask,
please pound that like button and let people know
that this video is worthwhile.
And while you're at it,
you can share it with others to let them know as well.
And if you've not yet subscribed to this channel,
please make sure you subscribe here to Dotto Tech.
I'd love to see your comments and suggestions below,
I read each and every comment,
so if you have a video that you'd like me to make,
let me know below.
And also tell me what your favorite features
of Google Calendar are.
I'm always looking for new ideas on videos
on Google Calendar.
'Til next time,
I'm Steve Dotto!
Have fun stormin' the castle!