The simple-to-learn, free Yahoo Calendar can keep you on top of household and professional events and allow you to share appointments with others. This service deserves its standing as the most popular Web-based calendar, although it's increasingly facing competition in the form of dynamic services such as the Google Calendar beta.
Accessing the free Yahoo Calendar is as simple as signing in to your Yahoo account from any Web browser on any PC; just visit calendar.yahoo.com. You can also access the calendar from within Yahoo Mail and Yahoo Messenger (we hope that the next version of Yahoo Mail will do the same).
Yahoo Calendar offers a clean, intuitive layout with well-organised grids and plenty of white space. You can pick from among 16 colour combinations and four background photo themes. Yahoo offers more in the way of cuteness than its rivals; its holidays, weather, and horoscopes pop with bright graphics.
Drop-down tabs across the top of the page let you skip to and from the Calendar and your Yahoo Mail messages, Address Book, and Notepad. A left-hand pane offers a tiny monthly view, as well as links for quickly adding events and tasks and searching scheduled appointments. The central pane features the calendar, viewable by lists of events and tasks or by day, week, month, or year. A printable view comes in handy if you need to slip a printout of events into a pocket.
Yahoo Calendar lets you click a time in the day view or the Add link in other views to pop up the entry window and start typing an appointment, and its central pane offers a Quick Add Event box that accepts free-form text input before demanding the date and time. Microsoft Outlook allows you to click twice on a time to add an event. Google Calendar lets you add appointments faster by clicking once on a date, then immediately typing into a text balloon.
We found Yahoo Calendar to be accessible enough for tech newbies to figure out, yet complete enough to keep a mobile professional on his or her toes. This service's sharing features can help you to coordinate events with other people if they are also Yahoo users. By default your calendar is private; just change the Sharing options to permit others to peek at your plans and make changes. You can also establish a Group Calendar, integrated with Yahoo Groups.
Especially helpful for those on the go, Yahoo Calendar imports and exports data to and from Palm and Pocket PC, as well as Outlook DBA files, Lotus Organizer, and Act. Such synchronisation demands the free Intellisync app, which took a few brief minutes to download in our tests on Windows XP. However, once we opened Intellisync and established our settings, it was unable to log in to Yahoo. This glitch mysteriously resolved itself about 15 minutes later, after which Yahoo seamlessly added all of our Outlook appointments to its Calendar. But while all of our Outlook Reminders appeared, Yahoo did not pop up alerts before impending events (though it can remind you via Yahoo Messenger, Mail, or mobile device); Google Calendar succeeded here.
Also unlike Yahoo Calendar, the AJAX-based Google Calendar beta not only imports from Outlook but also operates with XML, iCal, and CSV standards. However, we suspect that Yahoo may follow, especially as its acquisition, Upcoming.org, already offers RSS feeds, iCal integration, and event exports to Yahoo Calendar. While Yahoo Calendar lacks the potential to add outside content via RSS, for now it does enable you to schedule updates from Yahoo Groups, Sports, and Finance services. Yahoo is planning to follow Google's open-source lead by eventually opening its Calendar code to developers, as it did for Yahoo Maps following the popularity of Google Maps mashups.
Aside from linking to your in-box, Yahoo Calendar lacks integration with Yahoo Mail. Google Calendar goes a step further by building in natural language skills that recognise a potential appointment within an e-mail and flag it for scheduling. For instance, we'd like Yahoo Calendar to let us instantly insert names and contacts from our e-mail address book.
Yahoo Calendar is easy to learn. You can access a well-organised, searchable online knowledge base from a Help link on each page, but Yahoo offers no phone or e-mail support. For complex questions, you're out of luck in trying to reach a Yahoo expert.
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kyleanderson911@yahoo.ca
09/11/2007, 08:45 PM
rating
9/10
I really enjoy the yahoo calendar!
Pros: I use the yahoo widgets day planner tool and have a calendar widget directly on my desktop that I can input data on to modify my online calendar
Cons: having trouble syncing it properly with outlook 2003
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gezmek
20/09/2007, 10:32 PM
rating
9/10
Great calendar for the many that just want a simple, easy to use online calendar without being swamped by un-needed bells and whistles.
Pros: Fast to learn. Easy to use.
Cons: None
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alvinlau
15/05/2007, 02:29 PM
rating
3/10
While a good concept, the fact that Intellisync for Yahoo doesn't seem to allow you to sync both between Yahoo Calendar and Outlook 2003, and Outlook with a Smartphone makes this product little use.
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tribalwarrior21x@mac.com
14/08/2006, 03:35 AM
rating
6/10
Need more outside access
Pros: easy to use. easy access to info.
Cons: absolutely no integration with blackberry devices - specially for calendar.
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chippewapublishing
06/08/2006, 04:50 AM
rating
2/10
Sorry, but I not more collaboration
I have a lot of authors with chats and it would be REALLY nice if I could sync their calendars with one major global one. It would be easier for them, too--especially since we use Yahoo! groups to send excerpts and info to readers.
Pros: Easy to use. Easy to find.
Cons: No RSS. No iCal. No collaboration. No fun. Cannot use Yahoo! groups calendars.
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