Google has finally made it quick and easy to sync your Google Calendar with iCal. In fact, setting up iCal to sync with Google Calendar doesn’t require you do anything on Google Calendar at all.

To setup iCal to sync with your Google Calendar:

1. Open iCal and select Preferences from the menu bar

2. Once Preferences opens, select Accounts and click the + at the bottom left.
3. When the pop up screen appears enter a Description for your Google Calendar, enter your email address and password for Google Calendar in the Username and Password fields.

4. In the Account URL option enter in the following address: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/maciverse@gmail.com/user – but be sure to change the email address in the URL to match your email address.
5. Click Add and wait for the sync to take place. Google notes this may take up to 5 minutes initially but that all future syncs are instantaneous.

After syncing iCal with your Google Calendar you can quickly and easily keep track of your events from any web browser and be sure they’ll be updated on your home computer.

Use Google Calendar to Sync Outlook and iCal

I also sync my Outlook Calendar from work with my Google Calendar and because I do so, all of my work events were added to iCal as soon as the accounts were sync’d. You can use Google Calendar Sync with Outlook and follow the instructions above to keep your work and home calendars all sync’d up.

iCal is a wonderful calendar application that allows you to create and manage multiple calendars at a time. One of its strongest features is its capabilities to both share calendars over the internet and subscribe to calendars in a similar fashion.

The latter feature also allows you to add Holidays to our calendars. To do this, navigate in Safari or the web browser of your choice to http://www.google.com/calendar/.

Create an account if needed and enter into the Search field ‘US Holidays’ or any group of national holidays that apply to you and click the Search Public Calendars button.

Now, add one of the calendars. Once the calendar has appeared under “My Calendars” and on your Google Calendars, click on the drop down arrow next to the calendar and select Calendar Settings.

Find the iCal button on the Calendar Address row and click it to find a link that iCal knows how to handle. Clicking the link will launch iCal and ask you which Calendar you’d like to include it in.

I personally created a new Holidays calendar but it should work seamlessly with any of the calendars you’ve already added. Congrats! Your newly added Holidays should now appear in iCal.