How to sync your Google Calendar with your Treo using a Mac

Google calendars are great, but unless I can sync them with my Treo 700p (or 650), they lose a lot of their luster.  After messing around for a bit I was finally able to get all of my shared Google calendars to my Treo 700p via hotsyncing through my Mac using Missing Sync and iCal.  Any changes I make on the Treo will upload to Google and any changes in Google will download to my Treo.  Want to know how?  Here are the deets:

Items needed for sync:
1 - A Macintosh running Mac OS X.  Version 10.4 would be best.
2 - Missing Sync version 5.1
3 - Apple's iCal application
4 - A Palm Treo 650 or 700p
5 - A Google Calendar
6 - An active .Mac Account

Based on the above list, you can already tell that this will not be free and is a bit messy.  If you happen to have a Mac with .Mac and the Missing Sync, then you're all set.  If you are missing a component, everything but the Mac is very reasonably priced (dropping $600.00 just to sync a calendar seems like a lot to me).

Here's how to sync everything:
1 - Create a Google Calendar at http://www.google.com/calendar

2 - Share your new calendar.  You can do this by going to settings - calendars - select the calendar you want to share - then click on share this calendar.  Once you're in the sharing menu, you will be able to see the private address of the calendar.  Copy the URL on the iCal icon. 

 

3 - In Apple's iCal Application, subscribe to the Google Calendar by going to Calendar - Subscribe and pasting the iCal address into the field.  A drop down prompt will pop up asking what you would like to do with the calendar.  Give it a name you would like and choose if you want it to auto-update or not.  Below you can see the settings I used on one of my calendars:

You will want to repeat steps 2 and 3 for every calendar you have in Google calendars.  You are able to import and sync them all!

4 - Make sure you have at least 1 writable calendar in your Apple iCal program.  The Google calendars are read only.  A writable calendar is needed to sync from the Treo back to Apple iCal which will then ship it to Google Calendars.  To create a writable calendar, click on the + symbol in the lower left of the interface.  This will create an item named 'Unnamed Calendar.'  Rename the calendar to whatever you like.  I chose 'Treo 700p'.

5 - Once you have a writable calendar, you will want to set it up to sync to .mac.  This step is not required but it will allow you to create events on the Treo and get them back to Google calendar.  To do this, select your writable calendar in Apple's iCal, then select Calendar - Publish.  A drop down prompt will appear asking for your publishing settings.  The settings I used are below:

Once you're happy with the settings, click on 'Publish.'  This will put a .ics file on Apple's servers that will update every time an event is added.

6 - Now you need to get the Treo 700p calendar from .Mac into Google calendars.  Just after you hit publish on your Treo 700p calendar, a prompt will show up asking if you want to visit the site.  Click on 'Visit Page' to go to the .Mac calendar URL.  On the lower left side of the web site you'll see an option to Suscribe to the calendar.  Right-click (control-click) on the download icon and copy the URL of that object.

 

Once you have the URL copied, you will need to add that into your Google calendar.  The URL should start with a webcal://

7 - Go back to your Google Calendar and go to settings - calendars, then click on 'Add Calendar'.  At the top you need to select 'Public Calendar Address' and paste the iCal URL from .Mac into the box.  Click on OK.  This will add your Apple iCal writable calendar into Google.  Now any changes that are made on your Treo will be synced to the writable calendar in your Apple iCal application, auto-uploaded to .mac, then Google Calendar will read from .Mac and display it in your Google calendar list.  It may take a few minutes for your changes to show up in Google calendar.  I think Google only scans the .ics file on the .Mac servers every 30 minutes, so don't freak out if you don't see something right away.

8 - Now all that is left is syncing your Treo.  Make sure you have Missing Sync installed and also make sure that Missing Sync is set to sync your calendars.  Once you sync all of your Google calendars will be taken to your Treo, and your Treo items will be taken to Google calendar.

Like I said, this is not the sexiest solution such as just having a simple app sitting on the Treo that will sync OTA to Google calendar, or a Missing Sync conduit that will auto-sync your Google info, but it does work. 

Listen to this article posted by Benjamin J. Higginbotham on June 29, 2006 2:38 PM | Permalink
More posts about Google , Treo 650 , Treo 700p

                                             

What about for windows?

What a great idea. I stopped at the phone step, becasue I only wanted to sync my Google Calendar with my video iPod. Works great!

is there any calendar system that can synch with outlook for my desktop with windows opertaing AND mac os 10 with the computer and treo???
I relize I am asking a lot!

I synced my treo650 with missing sync version 5.1.1 and google calendar through ical on my mac. It worked fine, but the times were central and I am eastern and both the ical and the google calendar had the the correct times. In addition, after each entry it added the PDT in paraentheses.

my treo650 has the right times also.
what can I do to fix this problem

Thank you thank you thank you thank you!!! After finally getting Missing Sync to bring my google calendar to the palm (not trivial) I was fairly happy... but your additional technique allows me to make changes to the calendar on the palm and makes the whole thing (even if convoluted) perfectly satisfactory. Wonderful!

You can avoid paying for a .Mac account and still make changes to your calendar on your Treo by simply sending a text message to your google calendar. If you text, for example, "Sept 25 dinner 8pm" to 48368, Google will schedule that appt to your Google Calendar. Then you can sync with your Ical using Missing Sync. Not perfect, but better that paying $99 per year just to be able to make changes on your Treo.

There is a way to do this directly OTA here

Thanks for this How-To.

You don't need Missing Sync to do this, Palm Desktop and iSync will manage fine, plus a .Mac account is also not required, any host that supports WebDAV will do).

Thanks for the insightful comments. I am trying to figure out a way to link my google calendar and Entourage. Any ideas or hints?
Thank you!

Is is possible to do this with a handspring visor and palm desktop? Syncing google calendar with my pda would be very sweet.

I appreciate your posting this, but it's not really completely accurate. You don't need Missing Sync or a .mac account to do this. Just use iSync to sync your Treo (or T|X, in my case) with iCal, and host your iCal feed on http://www.icalx.com or similar. The one problem is that Google doesn't seem to like to delete events when they're deleted from the iCal feed.

has anyone tried goosync yet? it claims to sync palm and many (many) mobile devices with the google calendar service. it appears to be cross platform too.

www.GooSync.com works just fine with over 600+ devices including Palm, Windows, Blackberry etc. in fact any SyncML compliant (and that's most of them) device.

It's free, try it.

contact sync in beta, due to ship in October.

have fun
Chris (GooSync)

Very helpful. Will changes I make to the GMail calendar go back to iCal for syncing w/the Treo?

thanks

Yes it will, changes are reflected in all locations

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