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August 28, 2008

More Flexible Notifications in Google Calendar

Last week, I received a message from Guy: "I LOVE Google Calendar! But... I wish I could set a reminder for a month in advance, instead of a measly 2 weeks. That is the only thing holding Calendar back from being truly awesome!"

Thankfully for Guy, Google Calendar's event reminders are even more customizable: now you can choose any period of time between 5 minutes and 4 weeks. This works not only for the default notifications settings, but also for individual events. As usually, you can choose to receive notifications by SMS, email and as Google Calendar pop-ups.

The default notifications are via email (10 minutes before each event) and pop-ups (5 minutes before each event), but you may need more time.


Tip: to change the notifications settings for a calendar, click on the small arrow next to the calendar's name and select "Notifications".

{ via Gmail Blog }

20 comments:

  1. hi,
    I'm in Sweden, I have looked into every possible configuration setting to find how to receive sms for an alert - how do you do that??

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  2. From "Notifications", click on "Set up your mobile phone to receive notifications". Alternatively, go to "Settings" and click on the "Mobile Setup" tab.

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  3. it´s right there now! was it recently added??

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  4. I hope that will be also enabled the feature to receive a SMS notification for an "All Day"-event the same day of this and not the day before.

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  5. I use the alerts both via e-mail and sms, and I have 2 main issues:

    1) I live in Spain, and even though my preferences are related to Spanish time, if I set the sms alarm 5 minutes in advance for a whole day alert, I receive it in non-desired times (I guess, according to USA time)
    2) What if I have a whole day alert (i.e., a birthday alert) and I want to be alerted at 11:00 am that day in order to cheer that person? As per now, I don't think it is possible. Any possibility to enhance it?

    As per the rest, everything perfect :)

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  6. nice info, but my hope same with Marco...

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  7. I wish we could set up bi-weekly events. From what I can see, that's the only timeframe that isn't available.

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  8. I'm with marco and fca2. I thought this was the best thing since sliced bread. I put every important date on my calendar so I would never forget. Only now, I get reminded the day before...just enough time to forget then feel like a douche the next day.

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  9. This is something I've complained about for a LONG time. If AOL's web-based calendar can handle custom alerts, than GCal sure as hell should be able to. Although, the notifications still aren't quite fully customizable, this is a step in the right direction.

    Anyhow, is this notification change in the process of being rolled out, because I don't seem to have the option yet??

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  10. That is some progress, but I hate it that one cannot choose another calendar than the one that you created first as the default calendar. To do that, one has to delete all the calendars and then start making them with the one you want as default the first one. How hard is it to put a logical flag to choose a default calendar from the a list?

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  11. This is a great step forward toward customizing reminders. When are we going to see the ability to snooze a reminder though? When I get an sms reminder, why can't I reply with 'snooze 4 days' or something similar and be reminded again 4 days later? This can't be all that difficult to do.

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  12. Bi weekly events are possible.

    After choosing weekly it's possible to choose between every week, every second week, every third week and so on.

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  13. If I wanted a reminder 24:05 for all day events I would choose that option- 24 hours added on to the time I choose makes this unusable for me..

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  14. i want to have NO restrictions on reminder times, may it be 5 months out or 5 years.

    Thanks

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  15. The two major annoyances I find that that birthday or anniversaries that are all-day events get reminded the night before. The other is that there is no way to snooze the reminder so you never get it again. Fixing the latter problem would mostly take care of the former.

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  16. Hi,

    why can the options not be extended even further? I am just creating an events calendar for our company and would like to be reminded 3 months in advance (for example to set-up sponsorships etc.). Would be great to add "unlimited weeks" as a function. Anything in the planning there?

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  17. What about going above 4 weeks for reminders. I need to be notified of stuff way in advance of 4 weeks.

    This is a problem for me and others and I bet it is easy to add :-)

    Pretty please?

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  18. Mmm what are you talking about?
    In the box for the reminder, you select weeks for the dropdown, and you can enter any value in the text box, so you can be reminded one year before if you select 52 as weeks...

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  19. nope, 4 weeks is the maximum

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