Apple → [Beginner] Google Calendar & Outlook

Doing the normal sync will only copy my local mac calendar and not my gmail calendar. From researching on the web, it seems I have two options that may work. Syncmate (free) or spanning sync 3 (25 a year). I will give the syncmate a shot later, but was curious if anyone has any other workarounds/options.

Before I bought my mac - in the wondows world I used Google Calendar Sync (free) to sync google cal and Outlook ( both directions)

I still use Google Calendar sync (though I only sync Outlook=>>Google), so +1 for that recommendation

Good luck! I gave up on it after wasting an inordinate amount of time with it. Outlook for Mac has to use Sync Services to sync locally with iCal first and then you have to synch iCal with Google Calendar and vice-versa. My wife has so much stuff in her calendar that it actually caused instability issues with iCal and Google Calendar could only important a fraction of her data. If my wife added anything to Google Calendar it was hit or miss if it would ever show up in Outlook. Once things did sync, you would see items duplicate in both directions. It was an absolute mess.

I finally just had my wife test it out using Google Calendar and Tasks natively and synch with her iPhone and a 3rd party app for Tasks. Once I showed her that she could have all of the same functionality that she wanted, she was sold. She has not looked back since.

Update Syncmate worked... But created quite a few duplicates to most recurring events. Took a while to straighten out. It even duplicated a lot of entries to my ex's shared calendar we use for kid events. LOL.. Oh well. Pisses me off. It shouldn't be that difficult.