I know it’s a couple weeks into the year, but many of us are still getting ourselves organized, figuring out what works, and making plans for things we’ll make greater progress on later in the year.  For some of us, that means we’re still trying to sort out what calendar to use.  If you spend a lot of your time in front of a computer, Beautiful Calendar might be an excellent option for you.

(Pardon the less-than-stellar graphic quality of the screenshots.)

What you see above is basically what it looks like.  There are different theme options, so if woodland critters don’t float your boat, you can choose something else.

The Perks

This is designed really well to serve effectively as a homepage.  With one quick click (on “show calendar”) your calendar pops up (if it isn’t already in view), and it looks like what you see above.  You still have easy access to web search at the top of the page, though.

The arrows to the left and right of the month name let you click through from one month to another.

The toolbar button (see below) make the calendar accessible from anywhere on the web.

How it Works

When you install Beautiful Calendar in your Chrome browser (by simply clicking the button on the homepage) it is immediately added as a browser extension.  This puts a little button in your toolbar.  Clicking that button will immediately open a tab that takes you to your calendar page.

At your Beautiful Calendar homepage, you can choose your design and begin setting things up.  Initially, the calendar displays just fine, but it’s blank (as seen above).

Click on a date and you’ll be prompted to connect your Google account in order to sync your calendars.  (You should only have to do this once, of course.)

As soon as your account is connected, your calendar will sync and update.  As you can see, this creates some updates even if you don’t have any events entered in your Google calendar, because it imports holidays.

Now you can enter events.  If you enter events in your Google calendar, they will sync to here.  But you don’t have to go over to Google calendar to do so; you can add them straight from the Beautiful Calendar.  Simply click on a date, and you’ll get this dialog:

Fill in the fields as appropriate and click “add,” and that’s it — you’re good to go.

The Bummer

The only downside I can see to this is that it’s currently only available for Chrome.  I don’t know if there are plans to expand it later or if this is it, but as a Firefox user I’m rather disappointed that it isn’t available as a Firefox extension.  If you’re a Chrome user, though, I highly recommend this, because it’s so simple and effective.

I received the opportunity to review this extension via BlogsRelease.