Garmin Connect Calendar

It’s good to see that some companies do in fact listen to their customers. I had a little moan a few days ago about the sudden changes to the Garmin Connect Calendar, and I wasn’t the only one unhappy with the updates. Thankfully it looks as though they have listened to our complaints and have rectified the situation

I’ve written a fair bit on this blog reviewing various online fitness training diaries and have always said that none of them is perfect for me and that each has it’s pros and cons. My favourite feature of Garmin Connect had always been the calendar which provided an at a glance, colour coded overview of the training I’d done in any given month. Garmin Connect was lacking in many other aspects especially analysis of trends and progress but the quick view calendar was my favourite calendar view of all the offerings. I was therefore very disappointed when they changed all of this in their recent updates. From my point of view the main mistakes they had made with the updates were:

  • Removing the colour coding from the various activities.
  • Removing the title of the activities.
  • Taking up too much space with the left hand panel which made the calendar too small.
  • Requiring too many clicks to edit an activity.

I, and many other people let Garmin know that we were unhappy with these changes and I am now pleased to report that Garmin have listened and have released another update hot on the heels of the last one that addresses most of these issues.

Here are all three versions of the calendar screen, the original, the recent (useless) update and the latest (improved) version.

As you can see, they have fixed most of the issues I had with the new updates whilst still retaining the new look and feel and the new functionality too. The colour coded activities are back and we can choose which colours to use from a limited palette. It’ll take a bit of getting used to the new colour palette but they are fine as far as I am concerned. The activity titles are back too so I can now once again see what each activity was. These two corrections not only make it easier to see what I’ve been doing in any given month but also make it easier to find a particular activity if I’m looking back for something specific.

They have also made the left hand column collapsible so that the calendar can take up more of the screen. Good work Garmin and thanks for listening.

One of the things I liked best about the Garmin Connect calendar was the weekly totals column at the right hand side of each week. That has, I’m pleased to say, been retained throughout this upgrade process and as I mentioned in my previous post this has actually been added to with a new row at the bottom of the calendar which gives you a monthly total as well.

There is also now a new ‘Year’ view which gives you an overview of your training for the whole year and allows you to jump to specific months. It would be nice if they could add the monthly totals to this screen though as that would then give us an easy overview of our training totals on a monthly basis throughout the course of a year.

Year View

Year View

Overall though the Garmin Connect Calendar is once again usable and it’s good to see a company listening to the complaints of its customers and acting in a fast and efficient way to address them. The initial updates were terrible and rendered Garmin Connect virtually useless to me and many other people but Garmin took notice of our complaints and fixed it pretty quickly.

 

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Alan Cole

Alan is a Freelance Website Designer, Sports & Exercise Science Lab Technician and full time Dad & husband with far too many hobbies: Triathlete, Swimming, Cycling, Running, MTBing, Surfing, Windsurfing, SUPing, Gardening, Photography.... The list goes on.

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