How I Combine my Work (Outlook) and Personal (Google) Calendars

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This came up in a conversation and I realized my methods might be helpful for someone. I figured I can write it up with step-by-steps here.

Background / Goals

  • I have a work calendar, via Outlook
  • I have a personal calendar, using Google
  • I want to overlay my work calendar in google so that I see work obligations when considering personal plans
  • Similarly, I want to have access to my personal calendar from work so I don’t agree to teach a training class during a family visit, etc.

Getting Work Events into Google Calendar

The easiest way I’ve found so far to do this on Windows is to use Outlook Google Calendar Sync – a free, OSS app. It sits in my system tray and does a sync from Excella –> GCal since that’s how I have it set up. I sync my Excella calendar to a Google calendar called “work” that I the overlay with my personal calendar in Google Cal.

NOTE: This app has to be open and running somewhere in order to sync the changes. I have an idea of porting ame of this code to use Azure functions on a timer so that it won’t be tied to a machine / tray app.

Getting Personal Events into Outlook

If you want the reverse and want to overlay your personal calendar in your outlook, you can do that with google calendar too.

  • Go into google calendar settings
  • Scroll into “Integrate Google Calendar” section
  • Copy the “secret address in iCal format”
  • Go into your outlook account settings
  • Go to the “internet calendars” tab
  • Hit new & paste the URL

How do You Accomplish This?

Your turn, dear reader! I’m very interested to hear other ways you’ve solved this problem, and whether you’d find a free/OSS cloud sync project beneficial. Sound off in the comments!

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