If you’re like most people, you have an Outlook calendar on your computer. If you’re not a Microsoft user, there are plenty of ways to show an Outlook calendar in Google Calendar. The first way is to open the Google Calendar app and click on the three lines in the top left corner of the screen. Then select “Show In Google Calendar.” The second way is to open the Google Calendar app and click on the three lines in the top right corner of the screen. Then select “Show In Other Apps.”
To do this, you’ll need Outlook and a Google Calendar (which is fairly obvious), but you won’t need any plug-ins, add-ins, extensions, or 3rd party tools.
RELATED: How to Show a Google Calendar in Outlook
Both Microsoft and Google support the iCal format, which is short for “iCalendar.” It’s an open standard for exchanging calendar and scheduling information between users and computers that has been around since the late 1990s. This means you can subscribe to iCals if you have the right link, which is the method we’ll use here.
Share an Outlook Calendar
Because we’re going to show an Outlook calendar in Google Calendar, we need to get the link from the Outlook calendar first. In previous iterations of Outlook, it was possible to publish your calendar from the Outlook client on your laptop, but since the introduction of Office 365, Microsoft only allows you to share a calendar with people outside of your organization by using the Outlook web app.
Log in to your Office 365 account and navigate to Outlook by clicking on the app launcher (the nine dots in the top left corner) and selecting the Outlook icon.
Click on Settings > View all Outlook settings.
Open Calendar > Shared Calendars.
In the “Publish a calendar” section, choose the calendar you want to share (if you’ve only got one Calendar set up it will just be called “Calendar”), select “Can view all details” in the second dropdown, and click “Publish.”
This will create two links: an HTML link and an ICS link. The HTML link allows people to view your calendar in a browser and the ICS link will enable people to import your calendar into their calendar program.
Click the ICS link, and a menu will appear. Select the “Copy link” option to copy the link to your clipboard.
Add Outlook Calendar to Google Calendar
Open up Google Calendar and click on the “+” sign next to “Other calendars.”
In the menu that appears, click “From URL.”
Paste the ICS link you copied from Outlook and click “Add calendar.”
Exit out of Settings and check that the calendar has been added.
The calendar will sync up with your Outlook calendar as long as you stay subscribed. It may take a few minutes for changes to the Outlook calendar to be reflected in Google Calendar (or it may be almost instantaneous, depending on when Google looks for new information), but your Outlook events should appear pretty quickly.
Customizing the Calendar’s Look and Feel
Your calendar is now synced but to make things a little more user-friendly, you can change the display name from the unhelpful “Calendar” to something else.
First, hover over the calendar, click the three dots that appear next to it, and click “Settings.”
In the “Name” text box at the top of the page, change the name of the calendar to something more meaningful. Then click the back arrow in the top left to exit the Settings.
The calendar now displays your new name.
Remove an Outlook Calendar from Google
If you hover the cursor over the calendar, an “X” will appear. Clicking this will unsubscribe you from the calendar. You’ll have to repeat these steps and re-enter the ICS URL to subscribe again.
