In my previous post I ended off frustrated because I couldn’t see my calendars on my iPhone. This post is to serve as a nice step-by-step set of instructions to move your personal information from the Mac to Google’s servers.
I assume when we start that you have a Gmail account, but have all your contacts and calendars on the Mac.
1. Sync contacts from Mac to Google
This part is easy. From Address Book Preferences, go to “Accounts” and check the “Sync with Google” checkbox. Click “Configure” to enter your Gmail username and password. Done.
2. Get your calendars on to Google Calendars
This part is easy but tedious. In iCal, select each of your calendars and go to “File|Export|Export” and save them somewhere. Now, go to Google calendar and create a corresponding calendar for each of your calendars. Then, import each of the files you created before into each of the calendars you have created. This is far more tedious than it should be, but when you’re done you’ve got all your calendars mirrored on the Google servers.
3. Get the Google Calendars back on iCal
From iCal Preferences, go to the Accounts tab and add an account. Select “Google” and enter all your info. Close the preferences box. You will notice a new calendar showing up on the left hand pane in iCal. Open the Preferences again and move to the “Delegation”, which should now reload to show all your calendars. Select them all and you should see a rather awkward nested structure appear and sync.
4. Get all this on the iPhone
To get the calendars and contacts synced on the iPhone, go to “Settings|Mail, Contacts, Calendar|Add Account” and select Microsoft Exchange. Enter the Google login details and when a new “Server” field appears, enter “m.google.com”. You will now only see your primary calendar on the iPhone. Now, go to “m.google.com” from your phone’s browser. Once you’ve logged in, select the “Sync” icon and then select all the calendars you want to have appear. Now, you should see all these calendars in the calendar app.
I must say that I would have far preferred to have the Google calendars transparently synced with my iCal calendars in a similar fashion to the contacts, but at least this works. Also, the groups I had defined in my Address book, which used to sync well with the iPhone have now disappeared. The fight continues, but after many hours, I now have nicely synced contacts and calendars.