Connecting a Google calendar

Updated

Google Calendar can hand out an iCal link for any calendar you own. Ourday follows that link and keeps your family’s week current without anyone retyping events. The bigger picture is at Connecting a calendar you already keep.

You’ll need a web browser on a computer for this part. The Google Calendar phone app doesn’t show these menus.

  1. Go to calendar.google.com and sign in.
  2. On the left, under My calendars, hover over the calendar you want to connect and click the three dots that appear.
  3. Choose Settings and sharing.
  4. Scroll down to Integrate calendar.
  5. Copy the Secret address in iCal format. It’s a long web address ending in .ics.

That secret address is the right one for a personal calendar. Google also shows a public address, but only if you’ve made the whole calendar public, which most families haven’t and don’t need to.

Hand it to Ourday

Text the copied link to your family’s Ourday number, or email it to your family’s Ourday address. Ourday reads the calendar, tells you how many events it found, and asks what to call it and whose schedule it is. It then lays out how it set things up, and you can adjust anything by replying in plain words: who sees the details, whether the kids get it in their briefings, whether it should mark you as busy.

From then on, Ourday checks the link about every half hour. Same-day changes get a heads up; everything else shows up in the next Today.

Google’s secret address lets whoever has it read that calendar. Send it straight to Ourday and nowhere else. If you ever click Reset next to the secret address in Google, the old link stops working everywhere, so just send Ourday the new one and say it replaces the old.

That brings your calendar into Ourday. For the other direction, seeing Ourday’s events in your own calendar app, see See Ourday in your calendar.