Calendars Help

The calendar settings available here are only available for users of the subscription service of GooSync. If you have not yet upgraded to the GooSync Premium account you can do so by using the upgrade account button on the home page once you are logged into your account.

Please find below details on how to configure your GooSync account to synchronise with your multiple Google Calendars.
If you need to ask specific technical questions please submit these to our support forum.

Calendar Selection
Multiple Calendars and Tags
Multiple Calendars and Categories
Read-Only Calendars
Changing between Tag and Category support
Reminders
Sync Window

Calendar Selection
You can view your Google Calendar list from within your GooSync account by logging into GooSync.com and selecting the Calendars link from the menu.

For first time users your calendar settings will default to Tag support. If you have selected a compatible device on your account you will see an option to change over to Category support. At present only the GooSync clients for Palm OS and Windows Mobile (touch screen devices) are compatible with calendar categories.

To select calendars to be synchronised you will need to click the Edit button next to the required calendars and then make the required changes. Once done click the Update button (shown once the calendar row is being edited) to save the changes.

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Multiple Calendars and Tags
If you are using Tags you will be shown a list of your Google Calendars as shown below:

Multiple Calendars and Tags

You will see next to your calendars an edit box containing your calendar "tag". This tag is what will be shown in the subject line of each event of that calendar once it has been synchronised to the device, for example:

[Vaca] Summer Vacation

In the example above you can see the tag in the square brackets. This indicates that the "Summer Vacation" event belongs to the calendar linked with the "Vaca" tag, in this case the Vacations Google Calendar.

This tag allows you to identify which calendar the event belongs to. Your "default" Google calendar will not use a tag when shown on the device.

These tags can be altered and you can select any tag between 1 and 5 characters, but each tag must be unique (you cannot have 2 "Vaca" tags for example). They are unique to the device and will not be shown on the events that appear in Google.

Any changes made to the tags in GooSync will be sent down to the device during the next sync process (any events with the old tag will be updated to show the new one).

Syncing Device Events To Different Calendars
In order to synchronise a new event on your device to a specific calendar you simply need to add the required tag to the start of the subject line.

For example, creating an event on the device with a subject of "[Toffa] Weekly Meeting" would synchronise this to the Google Calendar associated with the [Toffa] tag (in the screen shot above this would be the "Toffa Calendar" calendar).

Please note that your GooSync account must be aware of the calendar/tag link in order for the data to be synchronised correctly. Please ensure that you have correctly setup your calendars and tags in the calendar settings of GooSync.

If you add an unknown tag to an event on the device (one that has not been setup on the calendar settings page) this event will be not be added to any calendar in Google.

In order to synchronise an event to your default (main) calendar you simply create an event without a tag.

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Multiple Calendars and Categories
If you are using Categories you will be shown a list of your Google Calendars as shown below:

Multiple Calendars and Categories

You will see next to your calendars an edit box containing your calendar category. This will be the name of the category that each of those calendars events will be synchronised to on your device. If this category doesn't exist on your device it will be created. 

Your "default" calendar will be set a category by default but this is the only calendar where you can have a blank category (indicating that it will synchronise to the "unfiled" category on your device.

These categories can be altered and you can select any category name up to 50 characters (please note that the Palm OS only allows category names up to 15 characters in length), but each category must be unique (you cannot link two calendars to the Vacations category for example).

Please note that on Palm OS devices you are limited to a maximum of 15 categories on the device. Therefore if you have more than this number of Google Calendars you will only be able to link 15 of them to categories.

Any changes made to the categories in GooSync will be sent down to the device during the next sync process (any events linked to the old category will be updated to be linked with the new one).

Syncing Device Events To Different Calendars
In order to synchronise a new event on your device to a specific calendar you simply need to add this event into a category that has been setup in GooSync..

For example, creating an event on the device with a category of Birthdays would synchronise this to the Google Calendar associated with the Birthdays category.

Please note that your GooSync account must be aware of the calendar/category link in order for the data to be synchronised correctly. Please ensure that you have correctly setup your calendars and categories in the calendar settings of GooSync.

If you add an event to an unknown category on the device (one that has not been setup on the calendar settings page) this event will be not be added to any calendar in Google.

On devices such as Windows Mobile devices you can add a calendar event into multiple categories. If GooSync encounters a device event that has multiple categories the event will be added to the Google Calendar whose category appears first alphabetically.

For example: an event is created on the device and setup to be in both the "Holidays" and "Personal" categories. GooSync will take these categories and sort them alphabetically, and then add the event into the calendar whose category comes first (Holidays in this instance).

However, if the category listed first alphabetically is not available as a calendar (i.e. it's a read-only calendar or it has not been set up in GooSync), then GooSync will skip this calendar and will add it into the next available calendar.

To clarify this using the examples in the screen shot above: an event is created on the device and setup to be in both the "Events" and "Vacations" categories. GooSync will take these categories and sort them alphabetically, resulting in "Events" coming first, but GooSync does not know about this category so will pass over this and will add the event into the Google Calendar linked to the "Vacations" category.

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Read-Only Calendars
You are able to select and synchronise any read-only calendars you have in Google. These calendars will be marked by the Read-only Calendar Icon icon.

Any events in this read-only calendar will be synchronised to the device as normal, but any new or modified entries on the device marked for a read-only calendar will not be processed during the sync.

Changes To Your Google Calendars
If you make any changes to your Google Calendars (adding or deleting them) you can refresh the calendar list in GooSync by using the "Refresh calendar list from Google" button.

This will then send a command to your Google account to obtain an updated calendar list and will update the display in GooSync.

Any new calendars added to Google will have a default tag or category added by GooSync. You may wish to change this once you have obtained the updated calendar list.

Deselecting Multiple Calendars
If you decide to deselect any of the multiple calendars in your list, and then synchronise, all events that belong to that calendar will be removed from your device.

They will still exist in Google but will no longer exist on your device unless you choose to synchronise that calendar again.

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Changing between Tag and Category support
If you wish to change between Tag and Category support you simply need to click the relevant button shown below the calendar list.

Changing between Tag and Category support

When changing between Tag and Category support you will find that all previously selected calendars will remain selected but you will need to configure your new Tag/Category settings.

The next time you synchronise all calendar events on the device, within the sync window, will be updated to use the new calendar format.

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Reminders
Next to each of your Google Calendars you will see a check box allowing you to select whether or not you wish to synchronise reminders for that calendar.

The following "rules" apply when synchronising alarms from different calendars:

Reminders active for your calendars
Reminders will be synchronised from both Google and the device.

Reminders turned off for your calendars
Reminders will not be synchronised from either Google or the device.
Reminders added or modified will be maintained during the sync process (e.g. reminders added to the device will not be added to Google but they will not be removed from the device).

Note - Reminders added to your device may not be added to Google if that particular calendar doesn't have any default reminder values set (under the Notification settings in Google Calendar).
Google have been making changes to how their reminders work and one of their changes is to allow the user how they wish to be notified when a reminder is available (via SMS, email or pop-up).
When the device sends a reminder it just sends the date and time of this reminder, unless Google is set to default to a particular notification type it will not be able to process the reminder time sent from the device.

Note - Due to restrictions in Google only the following reminder times can be sent from the device (if Google encounters an event with an unsupported alarm time that event will have its reminder removed before the event is added to Google Calendar):

  • 5 minutes
  • 10 minutes
  • 15 minutes
  • 20 minutes
  • 25 minutes
  • 30 minutes
  • 45 minutes
  • 1 hour
  • 2 hours
  • 3 hours
  • 1 day
  • 2 days
  • 1 week

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Sync Window
You will find the sync window settings at the bottom of the Calendars page:

Sync Window

Only appointments that fall within these dates will be synchronised between your device and Google. Simply select the relevant number of days from the two drop-down boxes to update your sync window settings.

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