I’m not a power user of any of the Google tools. I have accounts and I do use Docs & Spreadsheets, Calendar and Gmail, but I barely scratch the surface beyond the basics of these tools. So when I stumbled across this little feature today, it made me pause and reflect that I really need to investigate these tools for more of these productivity enhancements.

I received an email from a non-Gmail using friend inviting my family to a dinner at their house. In the body of the email was a time and date for the dinner. Since I use Google Calendar, I decided to create an Event from the email. This is the first time I have used this feature. So, I clicked on the more actions dropdown menu and choose Create Event.The event pop up opens up with the date and time already prepopulated within the event. Google Calendar has gone through the Gmail message and found a date and time in the body of the email and prepopulated the event based on that information. It even went so far as to make a decent guess as to what the title of the event might be and prepopulate that as well.

I know in programming terms it is really not hugely difficult to parse the email message and find dates and times, although in this case it was made a bit more difficult because it wasn’t a well formed date and time, but still it was a really nice productivity feature to stumble upon in the Google suite. And one that makes it much easier to schedule an event from an email in Google than it does in Outlook.