How to: Use iCal and Google Calendar together

This post is for those who make use of both Google Calendar and Apple’s iCal/Calendar. Or want to but didn’t know if it was possible.

I receive a lot of meeting requests/invites on my professional email account which is run on Google Apps for Work. A lot of the time, it’s just easier to ‘accept’ the invite directly from Gmail but then I’d have to manually add it to Calendar on OS X (which would then sync on my phone with iCloud) and was a bit of a schlep.

My default calendar is Apple’s built-in one, so I needed these two platforms to talk to each other. Of course this works with any Gmail account, not just professional Google ones.

Here are step-by-step instructions to have Google Calendar sync with Apple’s calendar:

1. Open Calendar on your Mac
2. Click on Calendar > Preferences

3. Go to the Accounts tab
4. If you don’t see a Google CalDAV lists under accounts, add it in

5. Click on ‘enable this account’
6. Go back to Calendar and you should see all entries added by the new account, colour coded.

Bonus: Google Calendar automatically adds South African public holidays into iCal/Calendar.