2. Yahoo Calendar

Yahoo Calendar

Yahoo has offered one of the most popular free online calendar services for many years. The Yahoo Calendar since its inception has been part of the personalized Yahoo experience that users can tap into with a Yahoo account.

Actually setting up a Yahoo calendar is as easy as setting up a Yahoo account; if you’ve got one, then you’ve got the other.

The first real step in dealing with the Yahoo calendar is figuring out the options that make the most sense for how you plan to use the calendar. Yahoo has included the basics of selecting time zone, working hours and how you’d like the main calendar view displayed by default (days/weeks/months). As is the case throughout the Yahoo calendar, default options can usually be overridden, but it’s still good to start with a few defaults that make sense.

Yahoo Calendar general options.

Reminders

The Reminder options is also a key area and one in which Yahoo excels. Yahoo offers the option of having a daily view of your calendar sent to your email address, which can come in handy. For event alerts, you can set yourself up to receive alerts via email and/or via the Yahoo Messenger instant messenger. Event reminders can be set globally for a default value (i.e. five minutes before an event) and you can send yourself up to two event reminders before an event. The global settings can be overridden on a task-by-task basis as well if you need to customize your reminder threshold for a particular event.

Add Events

A usable calendar is all about adding events. The Yahoo calendar is still a little backward in this key area. Whereas PC users in general are now used to simply double clicking the date box in their desktop email clients like Microsoft Outlook, in Yahoo Calendar you actually need to click the [Add] button. It’s not a big deal though and is something that you can get used to once you start using the calendar on a day-to-day basis-but still, it is annoying.

Setting up a repeating event is very powerful on Yahoo with options for repeating an event every day, week, month, year, Mon/Wed/Fri, Tues/Thurs, Mon/Thurs/Fri and Sat/Sun. You can also set up the reminders for ever other, every third or every fourth week.

Options for repeating, invitations and reminders.

Yahoo Calendar also offers a number of other solid options for getting your event information into your calendar from your other calendar sources like Microsoft Outlook or Palm desktop. At a basic level, there is import/export functionality for Yahoo Calendar to Outlook and Palm. The only problem is that it’s a manual process and your calendars will only be as up to date and synchronized as the last time you manually import and export.

Yahoo does have a solution to the calendar synchronization issue. If you dig a little deeper, Yahoo has an option for getting calendar information from your existing Outlook calendar synchronized. Under the Sync tab, Yahoo offers Yahoo Autosync, which is a service that automatically synchronizes Yahoo calendar data with Outlook, Outlook Express and the Palm Desktop

Autosync is a painless install that offers a great deal of power. The default settings have two-way synchronization such that changes in either Yahoo Calendar or the local Outlook calendar are made to each other. When and if a conflict arises, you get notification. The synchronization itself can occur as events are added or you could choose to have the synchronization only occur after you manually click a button.

Sharing

The real magic of an online calendar is how well and how easily it can be shared. With Yahoo, you can make the entire calendar publicly accessible and you also get granular control over sharing with other Yahoo users.

Settings for sharing are quite granular and can be confusing when you first glance at them. The first step is to go to the main sharing options pages that specify the default settings for your calendar. The critical step is the first set of options, which lets the user specify who can see the calendar: no one, defined friends (which must also be Yahoo users) or “anyone,” which makes the calendar entirely public.

Then there are the default actions for individual events, which add a further level of granular control. Users can specify that a particular event is private, labeled as “busy” (where other can see something is scheduled but don’t get the full details) and then lastly what Yahoo calls “public” (where friends can see all the details).

Yahoo Calendar sharing options.

Though that may sound like all the options you may need for sharing, it’s really not. The other side of the equation is getting those shared event entries to show up in your friends’ calendars and vice versa- getting their events to show up in yours (if they’ve given you permission, that is). Again, Yahoo offers a number of different ways to let you see your friends’ events. The first is something called Time Guides (listed under Yahoo Calendar’s Options menu) which let you link to other sources of calendar information on Yahoo, including financial information, U.S. calendar information (for holidays), sporting teams events and your friends’ calendars. It should be as easy as simply adding your friends to your Time Guide list, and boom, you see their stuff-the reality isn’t quite as clean, unfortunately.

While you can easily add any valid Yahoo ID as one of your friends whose calendar you’d like to see, that doesn’t mean those friends want you too see their calendars. In the Time Guides view, Yahoo does not indicate whether or not you actually have the necessary permission to actually see your friends’ events.

Month view of calendar with Time Guide for NHL Hockey schedule.

To actually see your friends’ events, you have to go a step further and try again in the sharing dialogue menu where Yahoo provides the option to view a friend’s calendar. In that interface if you enter in a friend’s ID that has not yet provided you with permission to view their calendar you get an alert saying that you don’t the proper permissions. Why Yahoo hasn’t added that as part of the Time Guides administration is a mystery to me and is a usability frustration no doubt for many.

But assuming your friend gives you permission, you’re good to go and their information (or yours if you give them permission) will show up in the calendar, though it’s not always instant. In limited testing, we found that the time between a friend granting permission for access and the actual user getting access to the friend’s calendar varied from between one and up to 10 minutes.

Once access does come through, your friend’s calendar data will show up with his or her username then the event title (if they’ve given you that degree of access). Yahoo does not provide additional options for easily specifying color coding or otherwise identifying and differentiating your friends’ calendar information.

Yahoo also provides the ability to invite non-Yahoo users to an event. Responses can then be tracked to see who is and who isn’t coming. The system does not integrate directly with Microsoft Outlook, however. So if you send an invite to an Outlook use, they click on the link, go online and RSVP in the host’s calendar where the event is tracked.

Yahoo Calendar event invite as received by Microsoft Outlook.

Tasks

Yahoo calendar also has a Task list function as part of its feature set. Tasks, however, can only get due dates and not specific times on those due dates. Showing a task the day it’s completed doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. It would have made a whole lot more sense to show it on the day that the task is due. There is, however, a task dialogue box on the side of the calendar view so tasks are not hidden, though the due date is obscured.