Importing and Exporting Calendars Previous to Window Calendar, Microsoft supported only static calendar data interoperability in its various calendar products. That is, you could import or export calendar data in specific formats so that you could move information from one calendar to another. This functionality has been added to Windows Calendar as well, and although it’s not as exciting as the sharing technologies we describe later in the article, it’s still useful. Windows Calendar can only import (and export) to industry-standard ICS format, which is sometimes referred to as iCalendar format. This format is supported by applications like Apple iCal and Mozilla Sunbird, but not by Microsoft Outlook (though Outlook 2007 does allow you to open files in ICS format). To export a calendar to ICS:

1. Select a calendar and then select File -> Export.

2. Select a location to which to save the file using the Export dialog box, and then give it a description name.

3. You can now import the file into another compatible calendar application. To import an ICS calendar into Windows Calendar, you follow a similar set of steps, although this time you’ll obviously need an ICS file to import. There are a few ways to get such a file. If you have a calendar application that supports exporting into ICS, you could obviously use that. But a better example is to download one of the many ICS files that are out there on the Web. We’ll look at this circumstance in the next section.

Publishing and Subscribing to Calendars Importing and exporting is nice, but both of these operations are like slices in time because they can’t help you if future changes are made to any of the calendars you’ve exchanged. What’s needed, of course, is a way to synchronize data between calendars so that you can ensure that your calendar is always up to date. And this, of course, is where the iCal standard comes in. Using the publish and subscribe functionality that’s built into Windows Calendar, it’s possible to subscribe to any number of online calendars and even publish your own calendars.

Subscribing to Calendars Before you can subscribe to an online calendar, you’ll need to find one of course. There are a number of online calendar resources that you can peruse. One of the best is Apple’s iCal Library (www.apple.com/macosx/features/ical/library/), because Apple was one of the first major companies to embrace the iCal standard. Apple’s site includes professional sports schedules, worldwide holidays, movie openings, and much more. Another excellent resource is iCalShare (www.icalshare.com/), which lists even more calendars to which you can subscribe, in a bewildering list of categories. Using either site, or a similar resource, you can browse different calendars until you find one to which you’d like to subscribe. Say you’re a Boston Red Sox fan. If you search for “Red Sox” on iCalShare, you’ll see a number of calendars devoted to the schedule of Boston’s major league baseball team. You might think that you could subscribe to one of these calendars simply by downloading it. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Instead, you must right-click the link to an online calendar and copy its web address, or URL, to the clipboard. To do this with Internet Explorer, right-click and choose Copy Shortcut. Then, switch to Windows Calendar and click the Subscribe button. This displays the Subscribe wizard, 20-14. Paste the URL for the calendar into the text box and click Next. Windows Calendar will connect to the Web and discover details about the calendar. In the next phase of the Subscribe wizard, you’ll see the name of the calendar (which you can change), along with options for how often it should refresh (or synchronize with) the remote calendar. If there are reminders or tasks included with the calendar, you can optionally enable them as well. This is all shown in article 20-15. Click Finish and you’ll complete the subscription. This process is similar to that when you create your own calendars. For example, you’ll see a new calendar appear in the Calendars list, along with its associated appointments, all displayed in a custom color. And you can edit the name of the calendar, delete it, or change its display color if you’d like. There are key differences as well. Subscribed calendars are marked as read-only. This means you cannot add or change appointments with subscribed calendars. You can only view them (or, as noted above, change their name and color within Windows Calendar). The people who publish the calendars to which you are subscribing are free to change them, of course. If they do change a calendar you’re subscribing to, you can get the changes by setting up a refresh schedule when you subscribe, or by synchronizing, which we describe below.

Publishing Your Calendars If you have access to a web server to which you can copy an ICS file, you can publish your own calendars as well. Since this action isn’t as common as subscribing, Windows Calendar doesn’t include a Publish toolbar button. However, it does include a full-featured if slightly-hidden Publish Calendar wizard that steps you through the process. To find it, select a calendar and then navigate to Tools -> Sharing -> Publish. This displays the Publish Calendar wizard shown in article 20-16. To publish a calendar directly to a web server, that server will need to be compatible with the web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) standard, a set of technologies aimed at making it easier to manage files on remote web servers. If you don’t have access to such a server, you can always export your calendar to a local ICS file and then upload it to a web server using FTP or whatever uploading tool you may choose to use. However, when you do this, you lose the best feature of publishing, which is the ability to keep the remote (or published) version of your calendar up to date as you make changes to it from within Windows Calendar. In the Publish Calendar wizard, you will first provide a name for your calendar (Windows Calendar uses the calendar name by default). Then, enter a URL where you’d like to publish the calendar. This URL is formatted just like any web address, using the HTTP prefix. If your web server is named

windowssecrets.com and you have dedicated a remote folder for calendar sharing called

ical, you might type in the address

www.windowssecrets.com/ical. Then, determine whether you want the published calendar to be automatically updated when changes are made and decide whether to include Notes, Reminders, and Tasks. When you’re ready, press the Publish button. Now, Windows Calendar will publish your calendar to the web site you specified. At this point, you can continue making changes to the calendar; unpublish it, if you’re not happy with the results; or announce the calendar, giving friends and family an opportunity to discover it and, hopefully, subscribe. The latter two options are available in Tools -> Sharing.

Synchronizing Your Calendars With the proliferation of local and shared calendars on your system, you’re going to want some way to ensure that everything is up to date. Fortunately, Microsoft has included a synchronize function in Windows Calendar that performs two key functions. If you have a remote calendar to which you’ve subscribed, synchronizing will ensure that you have the very latest version. And if you are publishing a calendar, synchronize will ensure that the remote copy is up to date with the changes you’ve made locally. You can choose to synchronize only the currently selected calendar or Synchronize All, which will sync up all of your calendars, in both directions. Both options are available in Windows Calendar’s Tools menu.

Searching Calendars In keeping with the Windows Vista search-centric user interface, Window Calendar provides a handy search box in the upper-right corner of the application window, from which you search for both appointments and tasks. If you just type a term into the search box, by default, Window Calendar will search all appointment and task events and will display the results in a Search Results pane that appears at the top of the Windows Calendar window, seen in article 20-17. However, you can also limit searches with certain criteria. If you look to the right of the search box, you’ll see that there is a drop-down menu. This menu enables you to limit the search to today’s events, the next 7 days, the next 14 days, the next 31 days, this calendar month, all future events, or the currently selected day.

Printing Calendars Finally, Windows Calendar includes a nice printing component, which enables you to print your calendars in various attractive ways. This is handy for people who need a quick printout or haven’t otherwise embraced the notion of personal digital assistants (PDAs) or smart phones. Before you print, you need to decide which calendars to include in your printout. Any calendars that are selected, or checked, in the Calendars list in the Navigational pane will print. So deselect any calendars you’d like to exclude first. Now, click the Print button in the Windows Calendar toolbar. This launches the Print window, 20-18. Here, you can configure various print options. Under Print Style, you can pick between Day, Work Week, Week, and Month print styles. You can also specify a date range and other options. The actual printouts are quite nice. They provide an attractive calendar look but none of the Details information found with each appointment. The printing functionality in Windows Calendar prints only appointments, not tasks.

Summary Windows Calendar is a decent standards-based calendar, and given the fact that no such functionality existed in Windows XP, it’s a welcome addition to the stable of Windows Vista applications. With Windows Calendar, you can maintain one of more calendars, subscribe to web-based calendars, and publish your own calendars so that others can keep up with your activities. Hopefully, this article has inspired you to discover this application’s many and varied features.