TechLifeWeb

One of my favorite features of Google Calendar is the ability to overlay other calendars on top of mine. Through the magic of the iCal standard there are lots of public calendars available that you can easily add to your Google Calendar.

If you are into follow a sport of any kind you can find your team’s calendar on Yahoo! Sports. This includes both college and professional teams. It is easy to add these calendars to Google Calendar once you track them down.

Here is how to get started

Go to Yahoo! Sports

In this example I’m going to use Major League Baseball

Click MLB
Under TEAMS, find your team
Click Scores and Schedule

On the right-hand side of the screen you will see:

Right-click on iCal select Copy Link Location (Copy shortcut in Internet Explorer)

Now go to your Google Calendar

Click the drop-down arrow next to Add
Click Add by URL

Paste into the box the link you copied form Yahoo! Sports
Click the Add button
If you want, since this is a public calendar, you can select ‘Allow others to find this public calendar via Google Calendar search?’ so that other people can just search for the calendar.

Now your favorite team’s schedule will be an overlay in your Google calendar. The additional beauty is you get the game times in your current time zone. Great for when your team travels and you want to watch the game at home. Also, once the game has passed, Yahoo! updates the calendar entry with the score of the game so you can find out just by checking the details of the calendar entry.

Yahoo! is good about keeping the calendar updated. I added the San Diego Padres calendar long before Spring training started and never really saw anything happen. Then as the team released its calendar the overlay updated and all the dates filled in.

If you have a few of these you can click the button to the right of the calendar entry and customize the colors so they are easier to read. If things get really cluttered, you can uncheck the calendar and it will be removed from the overlay so you can see just your schedule.