How to schedule your Olympic viewing with Outlook.
At the risk of attracting the attention of the, now infamous, Olympic Branding Police … we’d like to give you some Olympic related tips for Outlook and Office users.
With so many events being broadcast live, scheduling your time isn’t going to be easy. In the USA, NBC is promising to broadcast every event live by using online streaming.
So Office-Watch.com went looking for an Outlook compatible London 2012 calendar that will show all events in your time zone.
Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 have the ability to show multiple calendars and show them either side-by-side or overlaid with your personal calendar. This lets you see when events conflict with your ‘life’ and lets you either see Olympic events or avoid them – depending on your level of Olympic interest
The official schedule of events is here http://www.london2012.com/schedule-and-results/ and it appears to be all in London date and time. If you go to individual days there is a ‘My time’ link, however it doesn’t show what time zone it’s using so check to make sure the web site has correctly guessed your time zone. Our American friends have an NBC calendar which has the option of London or your local time.
Outlook Olympic calendar
The Guardian newspaper has the Olympic calendar in two formats.
There’s a spreadsheet published on Google Docs that you can download to Excel via File | Download as …
They also have an iCal version of the schedule. An iCal file can be imported into Outlook. Go to this link, click Download and get the iCal (.ics) file.
To view the iCal file in Outlook 2007/2010 go to File | Open | Calendar and open the iCal file. In most cases you should be able to double-click on the ics file to import into Outlook. Or drag and drop the .ics file into Outlook.
The iCal will be imported as a separate calendar as opposed to filling an existing calendar with many new appointments.
To view the Olympic calendar you have some choices. By default, Outlook 2007/Outlook 2010 shows calendars side-by-side.
But if you choose View | View in Overlay mode you can see one or more calendars as if they were a single calendar.
The arrow buttons on the tabs will also let you switch between the two views.
Live iCal
The downloadable iCal from The Guardian is good but not ideal. What would be better is an online shared calendar that can be opened in Outlook. A shared calendar can be updated to show agenda changes like rescheduling for weather as well as the teams/individuals/countries playing in the latter stages of competition (semi-finals etc).
We did find a live calendar via iCalShare which has been created by some volunteers who promise “Every single gold medal match listed here, with updates on who’s playing who in what final, if possible”. However, as you can see, the event listing isn’t as complete as the Guardian iCal download.
To use a shared online calendar you have a few options:
Make sure Outlook is running, go to http://icalshare.com/calendars/5977, click on ‘Subscribe to Calendar’ and then allow Outlook to open the calendar.
Outlook will open the calendar and then occasionally check over the Internet for updates.
Or you can copy the .ics link and paste it into Outlook via the Open Calendar from the Internet.
You can view an Internet Shared Calendar in side-by-side or overlay view.
Your time
When the calendar is imported it should appear in the local time for that computer. For example, here’s the London 2012 calendar imported for our Aussie readers on the east coast:
Search
The Olympics calendar is a lot to take in but you can narrow down the list with a search:
Remember: ‘Football’ is what the rest of us call ‘Soccer’
We’ve not forgotten about the Paralympics starting 29 August 2012… once we find a reputable calendar source we’ll let you know.
Statement of the bleedingly obvious
Office Watch isn’t connected to the Olympics in any way and isn’t pretending to be. We’re merely providing some useful information for our readers to help them enjoy the Olympic coverage in their time zone.
See Also
- More on Outlook, time zones and Worldmate
- Worldmate and Outlook
- Final London 2012 medal tally in Excel
- London 2012 medal tally in Excel
- Put the World Cup calendar into Outlook
- Clever Outlook Contacts on Kindle
- The Find function in Office – Part 1
- Clever Outlook Contacts
