Deficiencies in Gmail and Calendar Integration
When you receive an email
invite for an event like seminar, conference, meeting etc nowadays it is mostly
online like webinar. The platform on which my associates conduct the meeting
are CISCO, Zoom or Google Meet. The invites arrive in all formats comprising of
text, images or pdf attachments. Some are sent well in advance requiring
reminders. I am also involved in conducting such online events, playing the
host on zoom and google meet. Such meetings are on behalf of Senior Citizens
Associations where I am a member or office bearer.
Earlier there was a good
facility of creating a calendar event directly from the email. Gmail used to
intelligently transfer data about the event to the calendar in suitable fields
like title, time, venue, description etc. I find this missing now. There IS an
option called create an event on the top menu in the Gmail. But it is highly
truncated. It just opens a blank ‘create events’ window where you need to
manually enter all the data. If the
invite has an image or pdf part then you are lost, almost. The event creation
page does not recognize requirements of webinars, like URLs, password, Meeting
ID etc.
In the Calendar, when you
create an event, you are the owner. There is a provision to change ownership to
the person organizing it but that guy may not be a Google account holder. In
fact, even if you create an event by yourself for an event owned by you, invite
can not be seen by all as all may not be on google.
If I want to enter details of
forthcoming events that I come to know, just to make an entry like an entry in
my diary for keeping track of them through automatic remainders this is not
easy. You should remember not to email the invite to others. Making monthly
calendar view – showing all dates in a month at a glance - as default, there seems
to be no provision in Settings.
Google is well known for
withdrawing or simply stopping currently available facilities products and
services. For example, when you get a
video attachment in an email, earlier, you could simply click on the attachment
link to open and watch the video. Now in ‘New Gmail’ you have to download the
video, save it in your disk and open it again to view it. Expecting a better
integration is a far cry. I have not studied MS Edge / MS Mail / MS Calendar
integration yet. But too many systems in use will spoil your efficiency. So, I
dare not try a slew of MS products under Windows 10.
Am I just to live with it?
Let me wait and see.
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