The Coolest Things You Can Automatically Add to Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a wonderful tool. While many people may know that you can import pre-made calendars with lists of various holidays in them, there's a ton more cool stuff you can do with the service that's either baked right in, or possible with simple scripts and IFTTT recipes.

Automatically Add Movie Releases

It's summer movie season and keeping up with all the new releases can get tedious. Let IFTTT do it for you. This recipe will add new movie releases to your Google Calendar automatically (note: you'll need to change "2013" to "2014" in the feed URL). If you'd prefer to be a little more selective with the movies you add, this recipe adds only the NYT Critics' Pick list to your calendar.

Embed Weather Forecasts

One of the neatest features built right in to Google Calendar is the ability to add weather forecasts to your events. To add this, go to Settings on the web and under the General tab, enter a location you want to get the weather for. Directly below that, choose either Fahrenheit or Celsius from "Show weather based on my location." Click Save and the next few days on your calendar will have a brief weather forecast in the upper right corner of each day.

Import Your Favorite Team's Game Dates

Yet another little known feature of Google Calendar is that you can import add the schedules for a variety of sports teams directly from Google. In the sidebar on the web, click the dropdown next to "Other Calendars" and select "Browse Interesting Calendars." Under the Sports tab, you can select your sport, league, and team. The schedule will be automatically added to your calendar.

Automatically Add Your Travel Itinerary

TripIt is one of our favorite travel services already. It scans your emails and adds any travel itineraries or reservations to its own app. That's all well and good, but if you'd like to also include those events in your Google Calendar, TripIt can do that, too. Between this, Google Now, and Gmail, you'll always be notified of everything you're doing on vacation.

Share Your Facebook Events with Google

One of the most useful tools of Facebook is your ability to coordinate events with nearly everyone you know. However, if you want to get your Facebook events in your Google Calendar, you can import them directly. In Facebook, head to your Events page, click the Settings drop down and select Export. Here you can right-click on either a link to your friends birthdays or upcoming events, copy the URL, and add that feed to your Google Calendar.

Save Foursqure Check-ins to a Calendar

Foursqure is neat for saving your location (or getting free Wi-Fi passwords). Adding your locations to a Google Calendar gives you an easy way to backtrack to that place you went to two weeks ago. This IFTTT recipe will automatically add the location of your Foursquare check-ins to its own calendar for easy review later.

Create an Event to Remind You About Starred Emails

Starred emails in Gmail are fantastic for reminding yourself to deal with things later. If you're still likely to forget, however, you can be reminded with calendar events. This IFTTT recipe will create an event at a time you specify to remind you to check any email you star in Gmail. You can also use this recipe to create any event you choose using an email. While this might not be the most useful if you already have a calendar app for yourself, you can use customized search terms to allow others to add events to your calendar via this method as well.

Find Out Today's Current Stardate

Yes, this is real. Without installing a thing, Google Calendar has the ability to tell you what today's current Stardate is in the Star Trek universe. Just like the sports and holiday calendars, click the dropdown box next to "Other Calendars" on the web and choose "Browse Interesting Calendars". Under "More" you'll find Stardates near the bottom. This will not help you keep a captain's log, however. Maybe try Google Drive.

Source: lifehacker