Category Archives: Microsoft Flow

Push Your Outlook Calendar to Google Calendar with Microsoft Flow

Sometimes you may want your Outlook Calendar events copied to Google Calendar. This can be done with a handful of clicks and Microsoft Flow. Additionally, this is completely free if you have Office 365.

EDIT: Based on some comments, I would like to clarify that this template only works for copying over your calendar events when they are initially created, i.e. inserts. It does not process updates or changes to your calendar events. You will likely have to look into paid software for this functionality. I’ve changed the title from “Sync” to “Push” to reflect this.

What is Microsoft Flow?

Microsoft flow is the third piece of the Microsoft Power Platform:

  1. Power BI – Interactive analytics.
  2. PowerApps – Low-code mobile and web applications.
  3. Flow – User-friendly event integrations.

The Power Platform is a set of tools aimed at business users that want capabilities that were originally limited to professional coders or BI developers.

Out of the three, Microsoft Flow is the weirdest because it’s so granular. The unit of measure for Power BI is the report, the unit of measure for PowerApps is the application, and the unit of measure for Microsoft Flow is the flow or event trigger. And event triggers are really, really tiny.

Essentially, a flow is a trigger and then a series of actions, much like you might map out with a flow chart. It functions similarly to IFTTT or Zapier. I think of it as the glue or connective tissue between different applications.

In this post, we are going to glue together our Outlook Calendar to our Google Calendar.

Why connect calendars?

Back when I worked a normal job, I had two calendars: Office 365 for work and Google for home. Now that I work for myself, that’s a lot more complicated. Sometimes a customer will create an account for me in their network. Sometimes I’ll partner with other consultants and work as part of their team. And of course, I’ve got my own work email at eugene@sqlgene.com.

I need all of these calendars to consolidate to one place. My natural inclination and personal preference is to put it all into Google. Now, there are sync apps available, but this sort of problem is a perfect use case. A calendar event is created in outlook, a flow is triggered, and that information is transferred to Google.

Using Flow

To use Flow, I simply went to https://flow.microsoft.com and searched for Google Calendar. The template search for Flow sorts by popularity, and unsurprisingly the top result was exactly what I wanted.

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Once I selected the template, then I needed to log into my Google account.
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Then I just needed to select the calendars from both accounts that I wanted to sync.
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And that’s it! I was pleasantly surprised how easy it was to do, and I’m interested to see where else I can use Microsoft Flow.