Consistency and reliability[edit]
As in other cloud computing applications, changes to Google Calendar are immediately visible to all users. This allows new features to be added without user action, but also makes it possible for new bugs to be rolled out to the entire user population, without users being able to refuse the update. On March 18, 2010, an update to add the Smart Rescheduler feature[17] caused problems such as automatic invitations to nonexistent users being generated for events that were edited in secondary calendars.[18] Despite negative user feedback, Google chose not to roll back the update, concentrating instead on providing a fix. According to user reports, the fix took effect five days later, on March 23, 2010.
Other criticisms[edit]
Many users of Google Calendar criticized the inability for time zones to be handled correctly in the application,[19][20][21][22] as well as Google's unwillingness to resolve the issue.[23] Until December 2010, there was no way to associate a time zone with the start/end times of a particular event. Because of this, users experienced problems when attempting to schedule events outside of their current time zone. In early December 2010, Google implemented a partial fix, allowing events to be associated with time zones, but it remained unable to display events each in their own time zone, like a travel itinerary does.[24]
Google Calendar does not support "tentative" dates and times for events,[25] which may cause synchronization problems with Microsoft Outlook.
When viewed on PC browsers such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, Google Calendar cannot show the contents of the 'Description' field without entering the 'Edit' page for that event. Even expanded Agenda view does not allow viewing of this field. This makes it impossible to know which items have had any 'Description' added to them short of clicking 'edit' for every single event one by one. Forums suggest hundreds of users have highlighted this failure for several years.[26]
Month view is designed to fit on a single printed page. The downside to this is that it lacks text wrapping to see the full appointment title. Many users have complained about this.[27] A workaround is to use another application to convert Google Calendar data to a format with full support for text wrapping.[28]