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BusyCal User Guide

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Syncing home and work computers with Google Calendar

You can keep your calendars in sync between your Home and Work computers by syncing both of them to the same Google Calendar account. For example, Fred has a computer at work and a computer at home and they are both configured to sync with the same Google Calendar account. So, if Fred makes a change on his calendar at work, that change will be sync'd to Google Calendar, and from there it will be sync'd to his home computer.

Google Work Home

It is not even necessary to use Google Calendar's web interface — you can just use Google Calendar as a conduit between your home and work computers. This is a great way to keep remote Macs in sync (like home and work, a husband and wife, or a boss and an assistant), particularly if you travel a lot and need to be able to sync from any location. You could even use a Windows PC at work running Google Calendar Sync to sync Outlook with Google Calendar and a Mac at home running BusyCal/BusySync.

In this example, we start out with a Mac at Work hosting the Work calendar, Google hosting the Fred calendar, and a Mac at Home hosting the Home calendar.

Google Work Home1

To sync calendars between home and work using Google Calendar as a conduit, both the Mac at home and the Mac at work must be syncing with the same Google Calendar account. Once both Macs are configured to sync with Google, they can each subscribe to the Fred calendar that is hosted on Google.

Google Work Home2

Fred publishes his Work calendar to Google. Once published to Google, the calendar automatically shows up in BusyCal at home and can be subscribed to.

Google Work Home3

Likewise, Fred publishes his Home calendar to Google. Once published to Google, the calendar automatically shows up in BusyCal at work and can be subscribed to.

Google Work Home4

The end result shows all of the calendars being synchronized between Work, Google, and Home. Any changes made on a calendar at any location, will sync between all of them.

To simplify things, you may want to host all calendars on Google and set up each Mac to subscribe to Google.

Note: Google does not support syncing of To Dos. BusyCal will allow you to create To Dos locally on calendars you are syncing with Google, but the To Dos will not be synced to Google. Therefore, you cannot sync To Dos between Home and Work using the method described above. However, iCloud does support To Dos. So, if syncing To Dos is important to you, you may want to sync with iCloud instead of Google.