Out of Office Series: Calendar App: Business Calendar
As part of my Out of Office Series, I am searching for a great calendar app, one that can replace my trusty Dayplanner (yes, one of those). I often find myself out of the office, getting calls and needing to coordinate schedules, or setting up a task for a later date, or about 1,000 other things. A good calendar is the base for a proper time management plan, and a great calendar makes it easier to follow the plan.
As a break in this series, I won’t be reviewing multiple apps, instead just highlighting the one I have already found.
Business Calendar meets all of my needs, is easy to use, and has some really nice features; let’s check it out.
Some of the features of business calendar are as follows:
- Log-in: This app connects with your Google account, syncing to your Google Calendar. This is great, as you can then access your calendar from phone, tablet, or computer. You can connect multiple Gmail accounts to this app, allowing for different events to be set to different accounts. So your personal events can be run through your personal Gmail account, and your business run through your business Gmail: then just a quick toggle view allows you to see all your calendar events or just specific ones linked to an account. You can also make a local calendar in place of setting a separate account, or in addition to. This level of customization allows for strong organization and time management.
- Homepage widget: This app offers a highly customized homepage widget, you can set it to Month, Week, Day, Agenda or Tasks only view. You can then set the color theme, the colors of the background/labels/titles/times/buttons, adjust font sizes, the transparency and even the visibility of different functions. This allows for you to have a widget that looks great on your homepage.
- Events: Events are easily added from the homepage widget. You can color code from 11 different colors, to group events together visibly. Events can be location set, so if you have to travel it will allow for distance/time accounting. Reminders, repeating events, location tagging, attendees, and event description are all easily filled in. If you find yourself often making similar events, you can make preloaded templates, that will autofill much of this information for you.
- Location tagging: This feature of an event needed it’s own section. If you set a location to an event, Business Calendar will use your current location to alert you when it is time to leave for an event.
- Tasks: This app syncs with Business tasks, and posts the tasks to your calendar. You can add tasks from the calendar, you can complete them off the calendar.
I do have a few wishes for what Business Calendar could do, but none of these are shortcomings, just things I wish a calendar app offered:
- Picture uploading: I would like the ability to upload a picture to an event.
- Document tagging: The ability to tag a document to an event, like the PowerPoint to the event reminder.
- Direct dial: The ability to add a phone number to an event and just clicking it would connect the call.
- Email events: When you create events and add the email addresses of attendees, it will auto-email the event details to them as well.
This app is in no way shorted by not having these extra features, in fact I would have been shocked to find them all.
Business Calendar: Google Play
Business Calendar Pro: Google Play
Business Calendar 2: Google Play
*UPDATE* Business Calendar has released an update called Business Calendar 2: there are extra features, updated functions, and additional features. Please check out their website for a detailed list of the new features.
