Google Calendar

Google Calendar shows your day, week or month and syncs with your Google account, so an event added on a laptop appears on your phone.

Features worth using

• Reminders and notifications: set an alert for exams, bill due dates and medicines.
• Shared calendars: a family calendar helps everyone see school events and appointments.
• Colours: give each type of event a colour, such as study, work and personal.

Tips

Add the date of the monthly safety review from our digital safety checklist as a repeating event. If you share a calendar with others, check who can edit it, because changes are visible to everyone.

Calendar invitations from unknown senders can be spam, so do not click links in invitations you did not expect.

Our verdict

Calendar works best when you put everything with a deadline in it: exams, bills, medicine, school events. A family calendar solves the daily question of who is doing what. The one thing to watch is sharing; anything on a shared calendar is visible to everyone who has access, so keep private events on a separate calendar.

Using Google Calendar for deadlines

• Add every deadline as an event with a reminder the day before and a second one on the morning itself.
• Create a separate calendar for the family and share it with those who need it, so private events stay private.
• Use colours for categories such as study, work and personal.
• Do not click links in calendar invitations from unknown senders. Spam invites are a known trick.

Short answers

Can I get reminders by email? Yes, you can add both notifications and email reminders to an event.

Why did a strange invitation appear? Unknown invitations can be spam. Do not click links in them.

In practice: A mother adds exams, a fee date and a doctor's visit to a shared family calendar, each with a reminder the day before, so that nobody has to remember by memory.

Read next

Use it with Google Classroom for assignments and Google Keep for notes. Put the monthly safety checklist in as a repeating event.