Google Calendar and Outlook just became slightly more compatible

Are you a calendar junkies? We have some deeply specific news for you: Outlook and Google Calendar are about to become slightly more compatible.

For anyone who organises or is invited to a lot of meetings via their calendar: you may be aware of a bit of an annoying hiccup between Outlook and Google Calendar. Essentially, if a meeting organiser was using Outlook, but was inviting Google Calendar stans, they wouldn’t actually appear as an attendee.

Like I said, it’s a very particular problem, but a bit of an aggravating one, especially if you like to know who has invited you to a meeting.

Fortunately, this is being fixed, meaning that this will no longer happen and there can be some semblance of basic compatibility with these two calendar types.

“Starting today, we’re updating this experience so that the Outlook user who organised the meeting is listed amongst the other meeting attendees in Calendar as the meeting organiser,” Google said in a Workspaces update.

According to Google, the rollout will be gradual and could take up to 15 days to appear, starting from August 24 in the US. No action is required for this to start happening, it will simply start working at some point over the next two weeks for all Google Workspace users with personal Google accounts.

Is it a small change? Sure. But as a calendar queen, this is the kind of nitpicking stuff that I live for.

And it makes me wonder if the founders of Google ever imagined the level of interoperability that would become essential to people’s work lives when they nearly sold the company for US$750,000 back in 1999.