Friday, April 19, 2013

Syncing Multiple Google Calendars on the BlackBerry PlayBook

One of the nice things about Google Calendar is the ability to have multiple calendars. I have three:
  1. My calendar is the main calendar, telling me where I am supposed to be. 
  2. My wife's calendar lets me know about her commitments. Knowing where she will be at any given time is important information for me to have.
  3. An "FYI" calendar lets me know about events which may be of interest or may impact decisions I will make.
Being able to overlay those calendars, or isolate them, allows me to see the bigger picture or zero in on any of the three areas. Having those multiple calendars sync across all of my devices is important.

My phone of choice is an Android. The day I purchased it and logged into Gmail, all three of my Google Calendars appeared and have synced beautifully ever since.

CalendarWhen RIM released the PlayBook 2.0 software update featuring a native calendar, I synced it with my Google Calendar. I wrote about that process in this post. Since I did run into a snag and then found a solution, the post explained both what I did wrong (though it seemed logical to me at the time) along with what I did to get the sync happening.

When in my home office, I rely on the Google Calendar on my desktop computer. When I am anywhere else, I rely on my phone's calendar. I rarely refer to the PlayBook's calendar, and therefore just realized only one of my Google Calendars (the main) one was syncing

If it's just as easy to have something working 100% as not, I figured a Google search would probably reveal someone else who had the same problem and someone who found a solution. (That last sentence reminds me of a recent post I wrote.) I was correct. After throwing some search terms into Google, in less than 30 seconds, an article exactly on-point on the screen.

In "How to Sync Multiple Gmail Calendars on Your BlackBerry PlayBook," Kerri Neill explains step-by-step what to do. Rather than repeat the directions here, I invite you to read her thoughtful post at the link provided.

The only part of the instructions that caused me a little pause came towards the end: "Once you see a message saying all settings have changed, you can reset your browser settings and you're all set!" I was a little unsure what "resetting my browser settings meant." So, I tried the following steps:
  1. I returned to the screen where I had changed "false" to "true" and changed the URL back to "false."
  2. In my browser, I selected Tools > Options > Content and enabled Javascript by checking the box. 
On the PlayBook, I refreshed the calendar. Instantly, the additional two calendars appeared at the top of the screen. Within a few minutes, the appointments assigned to those additional two calendars appeared on the PlayBook.

I realize this post is applicable only to a specific subset of readers, those whose tablet is a PlayBook and need to sync multiple Google Calendars. However, for that subset of readers, the instructions I reference may make a huge difference.

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