Another Christmas lunchtime chat … this time with John and Philip.
We got to talking about missing address books, contacts and calendars … as you do at Christmas with perhaps labels to be printed and menu choices to be remembered.
I started off by saying that I’d decided to store my menu list in the Notes field in my calendar event – something so obvious, but something I’d never thought of doing before. This led to a mention of losing your paper-based address book – calamity.
I described my solution to the latter, and explained how I also enhanced the calendar experience to share both with my wife.
The trick is to setup a separate shared Google account for the two of you. I’ve previously suggested this is a good idea because you can use this address when you’re asked to supply an address by any retailer or utilities’ provider. Doing this means not only is the information shared between the two of you, but potential “junk mail” is all in one place.
So having your new Google account, you import all the contacts in your personal account into the new one. On your device you then disable (depending upon the device and email service) any contact list other than the new one. You do the same on your partner’s device(s). Any changes in Contacts on one device will change the same on the others. Bingo! You don’t need to worry about losing your paper-based Address Book again, and you should be relatively confident that your Contact list is up-to-date.
A different strategy for Shared Calendars. This is a really useful feature in Google Calendars. You can create multiple Calendars within an account, and share them with whoever you might want to.
Finally, all the above is predicated on the decision NOT to use the native calendar and contacts facilities supplied with your device. None of my far too many Apple devices use anything other than Google accounts. I may use the Apple application, but they only reference Google accounts.