Access to your Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar from Outlook in a Windows 10 device

Let’s say since the beginning that link and access your Google Mail, Contacts and Calendar with Outlook, even the last version or the 365 cloud version, is still not completely possible!
If you go to the Microsoft Community forum you will find many threads complaining about this!!

Let’s see what we can do and at the end, in the conclusions, what it is better 😉

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Gmail account

You can only create an email account for your Gmail in order to read and write email also from that email provider: to do so and have ìeverything work properly (even sending email) I believe (at least I succeeded doing it) that you have to set in your Google account, in its Security section, the Two-Step verification and then create a specific password to be used for that app: how to use it is explained in a Google Help page. The first time you access to that email account from a device, a popup will appear on your smartphone asking for a second confirmation … and that’s all! In the following some screenshots that may help you:

Google Two-step authentication (1)

Google Two-step authentication (2)

Google Two-step authentication (3)

Google Two-step authentication (4)

Google app password (1)

Google app password (2)

Google app password (3)

Add in Outlook, Gmail as email provider (1)

Add in Outlook, Gmail as email provider (2): be careful to set only to some months the period to save offline the email for that account

Add in Outlook, Gmail as email provider (2): try the account

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Google Contacts

Related to Google Contacts, no way to link them and the only way is to export contacts and import them from Google (as a .csv Outlook format) and then import to Outlook.live.com/people. There is a Microsoft help page that explains how to save in CSV UTF-8 format the contact file downloaded from Google as a CSV but, after having done manually all the procedure described in that note (that is something Outlook could do automatically on server side while importing!), a popup appears saying that the format is not the correct one and to check you have exported as an Outlook CSV (as I did!). So the only way I found to import is without changing with excel the CSV file but only emails were imported as they are, while other information (e.g. phone numbers, addresses) was written in the note field (even though Outlook contacts can have obviously fields for that information too)! Really a pity!!

Export Google Contacts from Google site as CSV Outlook

Modify the downloaded CSV file as explained in Microsoft help page (1)

Modify the downloaded CSV file as explained in Microsoft help page (2)

Modify the downloaded CSV file as explained in Microsoft help page (3)

Modify the downloaded CSV file as explained in Microsoft help page (4)

Import the UTF-8 CSV file in Outlook.com (1)

Import the UTF-8 CSV file in Outlook.com (2)

Import the UTF-8 CSV file in Outlook.com (3)

Import the UTF-8 CSV file in Outlook.com (4): inexplicable problem in importing the modified file!!

Import the CSV file as exported by Google in Outlook CSV format: only emails are recognized while all other information is put in the note field!

In this article it is suggested to “try downloading this sample CSV file and copying the information from your CSV file to the appropriate columns in the sample CSV file” but the procedure of editing the excel file of your contacts with that sample one seems to me really ridiculous so I did not. The format with which Google saves contacts as CSV for Outlook should be well known and already having to do a procedure of converting to CSV UTF-8 with Excel would seem to me not due but, okay, I did it anyway … but nothing more!
I think Microsoft should fix this migration compatibility issue or, even better support hooking up to Google contacts as its Mail app does, … otherwise, in my opinion, Outlook will be less and less used …
😦

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Google Calendar

As for events, you can share the Google Calendar even between different accounts. However, those will be static entries and changes in one account will not be reflected in another one. Therefore it is possible to view the Google Calendar from Outlook but every change you can make or new events will not be synchronized … so better not do it!! In fact, the only way to see Google Calendar in Outlook is to use the create in Google Calendar a sharing link that however allows only to read and not to write in that Calendar.
You can see also this article from Microsoft.

From Google Calendar select Settings and sharing (1)

From Google Calendar select Settings and sharing (2)

From Google Calendar select Settings and sharing (2): copy the link to share your Calendar

Outlook: ad the shared Google Calendar (1)

Outlook: ad the shared Google Calendar (2)

Outlook: ad the shared Google Calendar (3)

Outlook: ad the shared Google Calendar (4)

Outlook: ad the shared Google Calendar (5)

You can see events form that Google Calendar BUT your changes or insertions will not be synchronized (1)

You can see events form that Google Calendar BUT your changes or insertions will not be synchronized (2)

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Conclusions

Outlook is a wonderful email/calendar/contact client but if you use also Google services (e.g. Gmail, Google Contacts and Calendar), as you probably do, the integration is very low until now. There is a service provided by Google that allows a good integration but is not free and it is designed especially for companies.

Therefore if you want to have good integration with Google services from a Windows 10 PC/Tablet for free, you can use the browser or, better, you can use the Mail and Calendar apps available in the Microsoft Store. They are Universal apps and they are the same also available in all Windows 10 Mobile devices. Here, after having added the Google account other than the Microsoft one, you can manage both Gmail and Outlook/Live accounts, Mails, Calendars (even Family ones) and Contacts. Going in Setting, you can set for each registered account several parameters (e.fg. how often synchronize, whether to use mail, calendar and contacts or only some of them). For example, you can choose, as I did to use only the Contacts coming from Google account and not also the one available in Outlook/Live and choose a different timing in the synchronization (usually you use one email account as a primary so you need to have only this instantaneously updated).