by Svetlana Cheusheva, updated on
The article shows how to share Outlook calendar with Google account in three different ways: by sending an invitation, publishing a calendar online and exporting an iCalendar file.
Sharing or syncing something between two different applications is often far more complicated than it needs to be, especially when it comes to Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail, the two most prevalent mail and calendar apps used today. Of course, there are a handful of third-party programs and services to make the job easier, but who would want to pay for something that could be done for free?
This tutorial will teach you 3 easy ways to share Outlook calendar with Google without using any extensions, plug-ins or third-party tools.
Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar app are fundamentally different, but they do have one thing in common – both support iCal, which is a generally accepted format for exchanging scheduling information between different systems and applications. That means you can subscribe to an Outlook calendar in Google if you have a valid ICS link. This section explains how to get the iCal link from a sharing invitation.
The calendar sharing feature is available in the desktop versions of Outlook for Office 365, Exchange based accounts, Outlook on the web and Outlook.com. The below instructions are for Exchange server accounts and Outlook for Office 365 desktop. If you are using Outlook on the web or Outlook.com, the detailed steps are here: How to share calendar in Outlook Online.
Important note! Currently calendar sharing works just once, subsequent changes are not synchronized. For more information, please see Outlook / Google calendar syncing not working.
To share Outlook calendar with Gmail, this is what you need to do:
In Microsoft Outlook, switch to the Calendar view and do the following:
The Outlook part is done, and the calendar sharing invitation is on its way to your Gmail account.
Log into your Google account and carry out these steps:
In a moment, you will be notified that the calendar has been added.
The calendar should sync up automatically as long as you stay subscribed to it. Normally, it takes a few minutes for updates to appear in Google Calendar.
If you do not want to bother sending an individual invitation to each person, you can publish your calendar on the web, and then share an ICS link to it.
The publish feature is available in almost all applications, including Outlook.com, Office for 365 and Exchange accounts. If publishing does not work in a locally installed desktop Outlook app or your administrator imposed some limitations to your corporate Office 365 account, you can always use Outlook.com for the publishing feature.
To publish a calendar in Outlook.com or Outlook on the web, perform the below steps:
Tips:
Another way to share Outlook calendar with Google account is to export and import its events. The major limitation of this approach is that you are importing a snapshot of your Outlook calendar. The calendars won't sync automatically, and no further changes that you make to your calendar in Outlook will be displayed in Google.
To export a calendar from Outlook, just save it as an iCal file. Here's how:
At the bottom of the window, you will see the summary of what is going to be saved. If you are happy with the defaults, just click Save. Otherwise, click More Options and continue with the next step.
Back in the main Save As window, click Save.
To import the .ics file to Google Calendar, execute these steps:
Upon completion, you will be notified how many events have been imported, and as soon as you exit Settings you will find them in your Google calendar.
Though the standard iCal format is supported by both Microsoft and Google, they seem to have a lot of compatibility problems. From my own experience, a shared or published calendar that is supposed to sync automatically in reality works just once – on initial syncing. Subsequent changes in Outlook are not reflected to Google, which makes this feature almost useless. My first thought was that I did something wrong, but after a little research I found a lot of similar issues reported to Google Help Desk.
Regrettably, there is no obvious solution to this problem for now. We have to either wait (or rather hope) for a fix or rely on special software. For example, according to Google, their G Suite Sync for Microsoft Outlook syncs all items including mail, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes in both directions. A few alternatives are described in How to sync Google Calendar with Outlook.
That's how you share Outlook calendar with Google. I thank you for reading and hope to see you on our blog next week!
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