Gmail Calendar and Contacts Sync to Outlook

2009 May 28
by Andy

You would think this would be easy, right?  Well it is.  Sort of.

Google in their infinite wisdom provides an application to sync your Google Calendar to Outlook, but not your contacts.  I hope this on the way, but for now you need to use a third party app to sync your contacts (more on that later).

So, how does the Calendar sync work?  The setup instructions are here, but in a nutshell, this is what you need to do.

  1. Download Google Calendar Sync at http://dl.google.com/googlecalendarsync/GoogleCalendarSync_Installer.exe
  2. Once a dialog box appears, click Save File. The downloaded file should open automatically. If it doesn’t, manually open it from your browser’s download window.
  3. Click through the install options and install the application on your machine.
  4. Once the installation completes, the Settings window will appearcalendar_89955a_en
  5. Enter your email address and password and select the Sync Option you prefer.
  6. Click Save and you are done.

Things should start to sync right away.  You can change any of the sync options by double clicking (or right click, options) on the Google Calendar Sync icon in your system tray.  You can also force a sync by right clicking the system tray icon and choosing Sync.

So what about contacts?  There are a couple of  third party apps out there, and frankly I’ve yet to find one I really like, but gSyncit is pretty good and is cheap – $9.99.  gSyncit is nice because you can sync multiple calendar and contact lists.  The only drawback is that it’s a one man shop, so I’m concerned about long term support.  The other app that seems to have decent buzz is OggSync.  I found this one confusing, but maybe I’m missing something.  My hope is that Google solves this quickly so that I don’t have to rely on third party apps.

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3 Responses leave one →
  1. 2009 June 12

    Hi, very nice post. I have been wonder’n bout this issue,so thanks for posting

  2. 2021 October 22

    Hello,

    You following link is broken on your website: http://www.baumel.com/www.lastpass.com

    Sometimes errors like can hurt your web traffic. Maybe check out a service that alerts you to issues like DeadLinkCheck.com

    -Fred

  3. 2022 May 2
    Andy permalink

    thank you for pointing that out! The link is fixed.

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