Editors' Rating
Published: 24 Apr 2006
The simple-to-learn, free Yahoo Calendar can keep you on top of personal 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.
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 stand out 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, which is 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; its central pane also 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, while Google Calendar lets you add appointments faster by clicking once on a date, and then immediately typing into a text balloon.
We found Yahoo Calendar to be accessible enough for newcomers to work out, yet complete enough to keep mobile professionals on their 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 view 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 handhelds, as well as Outlook DBA files, Lotus Organizer and ACT!. Such synchronisation demands the free Intellisync program, which took a few minutes to download in our tests on Windows XP. However, once we opened Intellisync and established our settings, it was unable to log into 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 (although 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. Although 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 email and flag it for scheduling. For instance, we'd like Yahoo Calendar to let us instantly insert names and contacts from our email 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 email support. For complex questions, you're out of luck in trying to reach a Yahoo expert.
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