Eric Stewart: Running Off At The Mouth

Android: Second GMail Account Calendar

by Eric Stewart on Nov.15, 2010, under Cell Phones & Providers, Technology, The Internet

It’s becoming more of an issue as more companies or organizations look to Google’s Apps in order to manage the organization’s email and calendars.  However, I discovered an issue today that it didn’t take me long to figure out the solution to, but hopefully this blog post will make it even easier for you.

So – you’ve got a GMail account for work, and a personal one.  Your Android phone is registered using your personal account, and you’ve managed to get your work GMail to sync as well.  But what about your work GCalendar?

Turns out, as near as I can tell, Android 2.1 and earlier don’t like pulling more than one Calendar from Google.  So, your best bet is to “share” your work calendar with your personal account.

  1. Go into your work “Settings” and “Calendar Settings”.
  2. Click on the “Calendars” tab, and then under your work calendar entry, “Edit” your Sharing settings.
  3. Under “Share with specific people”, enter the email address of your other account (this goes much easier if you have the accounts set up for “logging into multiple accounts”).
  4. For best results (in my opinion, anyway), you should have the settings for your personal account be “Make changes AND manage sharing”.

You’ll see the entries of your work account on your personal account as well.  The work calendar will show up as a separate calendar on your personal calendar list, and it should also be accessible from your phone’s calendar, too!

I cannot yet say if the notifications work for the “second” calendar.  But at least the appointments are showing up.

Now – about the colors:

If you (at least on the Samsung Epic 4G), go into your Calendar, then “Menu”, “Settings”, and “Calendars”, you’ll see the list of calendars and their color coding.  While I don’t have any clue as to how to change the “My Calendar” to a different color than pink, or Facebook’s calendar to something other than blue, the colors for your Google Calendar entry(ies) are controlled by the settings in Google Calendar.  On the left side of the Google Calendar web page, you’ll see “My Calendars”, with the calendars listed.  There should be a “down arrow” of sorts on the right side of the listing.  Click that down arrow and there should be a color palette offering you choices of colors for each of the calendars.  Select the colors you like, wait for a calendar sync (or force one), and the colors should update on your phone accordingly.

Addendum: Say you want common holidays on your phone’s calendar.  No need to manually add them all to your phone or Google calendar – just go into the web version of your primary account’s Google Calendar:

  1. Below “My Calendars”, look for “Other Calendars”.
  2. Click on “Add”.
  3. “Browse Interesting Calendars”.
  4. For Holidays, choose the “Holidays” tab and “Subscribe” to the country of your choice.

That’s it.  You can even color the holidays differently than your other calendar(s).

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1 Comment for this entry

  • Teresa

    Hey, thanks a lot for this heads up. I didn’t even know you could sync your GCalendar with the Android. I’ve been manually inputting events on my phone’s calendar before this one.

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