How To Fix The Times In Google Calendar After Changing The Timezone

A number of Google Calendar users accept been complaining loudly about instances where GCal has bollixed upward their consequence times when they moved betwixt time zones. At present Google appears to be poised to innovate improvements in the service's performance.

People have been complaining about the problem for some months now in an agile give-and-take thread exists at the GCal forum. The current thread contains 188 posts dating dorsum to February 2010, but older threads go back years.

The critics' main complaint is that Google Calendar doesn't let users specify a time zone in a new effect. So if you schedule a meeting to take place at three p.g. in Chicago, only you practice information technology from your desk in California, GCal will shift the scheduled outcome two hours back when you show upward in the Central fourth dimension zone. Yous tin can't tell GCal not to make that shift when yous create the appointment.

"I am having to run separate calendars for each time zone to ensure when planning my meetings I get the times right and share them correctly with others," says one person in the GCal forum. "This is particularly difficult when I am sent invitations by people who use applications like MS Outlook which practice handle time zones."

Other users set event times earlier or afterwards to compensate for the changes GCal will make once they begin crossing time zones. But these clunky workarounds will non be necessary for much longer.

I talked to GCal product director Grace Kwak, who acknowledged users' need to exist able to ready time zones for individual events, and said that her team will before long add together that capability to the calendar. "We are working on it right now, and it's something we think is a groovy feature addition."

Kwak said that the GCal squad is besides working on a characteristic that will automatically adjust air travel times, much as airlines do.

Kwak would non say exactly when the long-awaited features will become available to users, but I got the impression that information technology should happen inside the adjacent few months.

Kwak pointed out that at that place are some good reasons why Google shifts event times based on your location, which the service detects using the IP address of your device. Kwak and others on the GCal development squad do their jobs from Zurich and Mountain View, and GCal's ability to automatically arrange conference calls prepare in Mountain View fourth dimension to Zurich fourth dimension is hugely helpful for keeping anybody on the same schedule.

Then GCal in its current grade seems to exist a flake of a trade-off. The calendar's style of managing time zones works swimmingly for certain types of scheduling scenarios and users, but very badly for others. "Time zones are very complicated," Kwak told me. "Google has 1 way of depicting fourth dimension: We use a universal clock, so in that location'due south like a universal time, and all the lines on the globe are in relation to that universal fourth dimension."

Kwak and her team face the claiming of adding features that will make GCal work for users who accept very dissimilar work habits, whether stay-at-habitation types or globetrotters, without introducing unintended new bug in the app. It seems clear, however, that the two features the GCal squad is working on at present–the ability to add fourth dimension zones to events and the automated adding for airplane travel times–should settle nigh of the fourth dimension zone-related complaints that users currently have.