Using Google Calendar to save time on business trips

You can order pizza online, purchase movie tickets from the comfort of home, check into your flights via your smartphone and much more. However, because coordinating all of your activities gets hectic, some things inevitably fall through the cracks. For example, when you get an email or text about a business dinner, you’re about to take off on a plane or in the middle of preparing a report. You forget to input the new event into your electronic calendar. However, good news has arrived! Starting now, Gmail and Calendar programs will coordinate to make scheduling easier for Premier Google for Work users such as yourself.

Say you get a Gmail email that has the lowdown on your restaurant reservation, Broadway ticket confirmation, your flight booking or something like that. No longer do you have to copy and paste the information, hurriedly scribble it down, or hope you remember it. The coordination between Gmail and Calendar adds the event to your Google Calendar, and all critical details such as times and flight numbers are included. But what if your flight changes or your restaurant reservation has to be moved up half an hour? No problem. Once the email with the new information arrives, that Google calendar entry updates as well. If you don’t want one event—or a few—appearing on your calendar, it’s easy to delete them manually.

You don’t need to do anything to enable this feature if you’re a Google app business customer; it’s set for you by default, whether you use Apple or Android devices. However, if you’re a Google app government user, you’re out of luck. You don’t have this feature, but hopefully at some point in the future, you will.

If you’re worried about who can see these events, worry no more. You control access, and even people with delegated access won’t see them if you don’t want them to. To establish access settings, other settings or to turn off the feature, go to your Google Calendar settings. If all of this sounds familiar, Google made this feature available to consumers in late 2014, so you may already have experience with it. That few months has helped Google smooth out bugs so that the experience is even better for you Google app business users. Still, it’s possible that errors may occur. In such cases, Google urges you to send a feedback report. Include the incorrect details and the email address of the sender in your notification.

So, as long as you use Gmail, you’re pretty much covered as far as remembering to put events on your calendar. Alas, if you prefer printed calendars, there’s no Google magic pen—yet—to write that information down.