Google Calendar vs Microsoft Outlook

Google Calendar is part of the Google ecosystem, it integrates with services like Google Now for creating events, Google Maps for directions and Gmail for pulling information about planned flights.

The app leverages Google Maps when adding location for an event by offering suggestions as well as offers opening Maps to help get directions to an event via shortcut on a reminder notification.

Google Calendar has a monochrome base design that's accented with colored-coded events and image banners that separate months in schedule view.

The app has 5 different views - schedule, day, 3-day, week and month.

Day, 3-day and week views split up the days horizontally and hours vertically. Month view lays out all days in a grid and displays up to 3 events in a day.

Schedule view displays an agenda view that allows browsing all events by swiping vertically. Additionally, the way events are displayed in the agenda view is context-aware. For example, adding an event called "gym" will display the event on a background with a dumbbell.

All views except for month view can be split horizontally to display a condensed month view at the top that can be navigated by swiping horizontally.

Events can be added from any view by clicking the red plus button that's available at the bottom-right corner of the screen.

Google Calendar is a free Android calendar app without ads that comes already installed on Android devices that have stock support for Google Services.

Google Calendar integrates with e-mail for quickly creating events from e-mails that contain the word "meeting" or dates or times, or any other information about events or plans that it can understand.

Google calendar allows setting how many reminders are needed with each having the ability to set how long before the event the notification should remind and if it should be done via on-screen or e-mail notification.

All views have an option of adding a new event by tapping the plus sign at the lower right corner of the screen. This opens up a form and allows the user to add a location, start/end times, guests, description, color-code as well as choosing if it's an all day event, how often it repeats, how many and what kind of reminders are needed and setting the users availability and privacy settings.

The app will color-code different calendars in different colors as well as allow selecting a different color for each event.

Google Calendar can be integrated with any calendar that support iCalendar format, including Exchange and iCloud, via URL, but it has to be done using the web client.

Google Calendar comes with a home screen widget, and there are also many third party widgets developed for this calendar app.

Through the Google Calendar's web client, it is possible to subscribe to any public calendar. Google also maintains a list of public calendars for various sports events and holidays in different countries and for different religions.

IFTTT offers over 198 channels to plug into the users Google Calendar.

Whenever you enter agenda / event title with the keywords (when available), the event will show up interesting flairs whenever the keyword inside the agenda / title you typed matches the flairs that are available inside the system, examples such as haircut, cycling, swimming, coffee, movie etc.

The calendar includes agenda, day and three-day views.

Microsoft Outlook comes with quick swipe features where users can quickly swipe the thread either from left (to schedule) or right (to delete or archive). Additionally, users can also customize the swipe actions to, for example, set swipe from left to archive or swipe from right to delete.

In addition to showing contact information, the People section of Outlook can show all conversations you've had with a person. Moreover, if you're looking for someone that's not in your contact's list, but is in your company's or school's directory, Outlook can pull that information through integration with Global Address List (GAL).

The app will automatically attempt to figure out which emails are important to you and surface those. The priority emails will show up in your inbox in a tab called Focused, with other emails in a tab called Other. It aims to separate spam and promotional emails from the important emails.

Microsoft Outlook comes with built-in cloud storage browser allowing you to attach files directly from services such as Dropbox, Box, Google Drive or OneDrive to emails and directly open attached files without the need for the main cloud storage app.