Although operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X have offered calendaring applications for years, Microsoft has historically sold such functionality as part of its Office and Works productivity suites. Starting with Windows Vista, however, Windows users are finally getting a first-class calendaring solution as part of their favorite operating system. Dubbed Windows Calendar, this application provides attractive and full-featured calendaring features, including tasks functionality, the ability to subscribe to remote calendars, and even a way to publish your own calendars for others to use. In this article, we’ll examine this new Windows application.

Understanding PC Calendaring

If you’ve ever used the Calendar component in Microsoft Outlook, then you’re familiar with the notion of PC-based calendaring and scheduling. Microsoft Outlook is an extremely powerful tool, enabling you to create and manage appointments, meetings, and other events, as well as tasks and other time-based schedules. For all its strengths, however, Microsoft Outlook isn’t perfect. First, you must pay a hefty sum for Microsoft Outlook unless you get a version along with other Microsoft Office applications when you purchase a new PC. Second, Outlook is designed to work primarily with Microsoft Exchange–based servers. Although it’s possible to use Outlook as an individual, it’s not ideal, and even the very latest Outlook version offers only very simple methods for sharing calendaring information with other people. Meanwhile, standards-based web calendars have been gaining in popularity for the past few years, and these solutions offer features that are much more applicable to individuals than what Outlook offers. Best of all, most of these web-based calendars are free. For example, Apple Computer supplies users of its Mac OS X operating system with a calendar application called iCal that integrates very nicely with web standards for calendaring, making it possible for iCal users to share calendars with family and friends from around the world. And the Mozilla Corporation, which makes the popular Firefox web browser, is developing its own calendar application called Sunbird, offering similar functionality to Windows and Linux users. Standards-based calendar applications offer a number of useful features. First, you can create discrete calendars in categories such as Personal, Work, Gym, or any categories you choose to imagine and overlay them as needed on the same calendar view to see how your entire schedule plays out. You can share calendars with others, via a publish and subscribe mechanism that enables you to superimpose your own calendars visually with remote calendars.

Using this functionality, for example, you could find a night in which both you and your wife were free to have dinner at a restaurant together, or compare your son’s soccer schedule with your own weekend plans to make sure you can get to the game. Because these standards-based calendars are becoming so popular, many organizations and individuals publish their own schedules on the Web so that other individuals can subscribe to them. If you’re a fan of the Boston Red Sox or any other sports team, you can subscribe to their schedule and always be alerted when a game is coming up. There are calendars out there for all kinds of events including regional holidays, concerts, and the like. And these calendars can be superimposed on your own calendars, if you’d like, within these calendaring applications. There’s more, of course. Standards-based calendars also support lists of tasks, which can be assigned days and times for completion and checked off as they are completed. You can print calendars in attractive styles, and use them as paper-based personal information managers during your work week or on trips. All of this is possible without having to deal with an expensive, centralized server. The Internet’s enterprising denizens have gotten their hands on calendaring and rescued it from the shackles of Microsoft Exchange. When we refer to standards with regards to calendaring, we’re referring to the iCal, or iCalendar, standard, which specifies “interoperable calendaring and scheduling services for the Internet.” Rather than extend proprietary solutions like Outlook to the Internet, the iCal standard proposes that all calendars should use a single, open standard for interoperability purposes. It’s a great idea and works well in the real world. You can find out more about the iCal format on the IETF web site (www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt).

Exploring Windows Calendar Microsoft isn’t blind to this change in how people are interacting online via standardsbased calendars. So Windows Vista includes a standards-based calendar application called, logically enough, Windows Calendar. If you’re familiar with competing solutions such as Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird, Windows Calendar will seem very familiar. It works with the same standards-based calendaring format, and it can publish and subscribe to the same sources as those solutions. However, because Windows Calendar is built into Windows Vista, it will soon become the predominant calendaring solution for individuals worldwide. For this reason, we expect standards-based calendaring to become truly mainstream during the lifetime of Windows Vista. Obviously, Microsoft isn’t giving up on its Exchange Server and Outlook product lines. If you want a quick understanding of how these solutions are differentiated, think of it this way: Exchange and Outlook are tools for business users, while Windows Calendar is for individuals like consumers, soccer moms, and your grandparents. Put simply, Windows Calendar is for people not businesses.

Understanding the Windows Calendar Interface Windows Calendar can be found in the All Programs portion of the Start menu. When you launch Windows Calendar for the first time, you’ll be presented with a standard daily calendar view, and you’ll see that Windows Calendar has created its first calendar for you, which is named after your user name (  20-1). The Windows Calendar user interface is divided into a number of logical areas. On the top is a menu bar and toolbar. Below that, you’ll see three areas, or panes, two of which are optional. On the left is the Navigation pane, which enables you to select between different calendars and tasks. In the center of the application window is the current calendar view, which is set to Day view by default. On the right is the Details Pane. This pane will change based on what’s currently selected. By default, the current calendar is selected, but you might select other items, such as an appointment or a task.

Understanding Calendar Lingo Because there are so many calendar applications out there, you might be confused about some of the language Microsoft uses to describe the various items with which Windows Calendar deals. Table 20-1 summarizes these items.

Working with Calendars and Groups The first time you launch Windows Calendar, you’ll see that it has created a default calendar for you with the name [User name]’s calendar (where [User name] is obviously replaced by the logon name of the current user). Each calendar gets its own name and color, and you can change either. For some people, this single calendar may be enough. But others may want to create different calendars for the different types of events they confront each day. Microsoft has also added the ability to create calendar groups, called groups, within which you can collect related calendars if desired. Take a look at some ways in which you might organize your calendars within Windows Calendar. As stated previously, the default calendar you get just by running Windows Calendar might be enough for you. But some would rather organize things differently, and there are certainly many advantages to using different calendars. First, because each calendar is assigned a unique color, appointments for each calendar will stand out visually. Second, because you can arbitrarily hide and show individual calendars, it’s possible to simplify the calendar view as needed, which can be handy when publishing or printing calendars. The important thing to remember is that Windows Calendar supports virtually any level of customization when it comes to calendar management. For example, you can use Windows Calendar to do any of the following:

Change the name of the default calendar: Just select the name of the calendar in the Details pane and type a new name, 20-2.

Change the calendar display color: Click the Color drop-down bucket and choose from one of the 16 available colors.

Add multiple calendars: Click the New Calendar button in the navigational control in the bottom of the Windows Calendar window. This is the button to the left of the Previous button. (Alternatively, you can select File -> New -> Calendar from the Windows Calendar menu.) When you do so, you’ll see a new calendar appear in the Calendars list of the Navigation pane. Since the default name is New Calendar, you’ll want to change that: Simply start typing to give it a new name. If the name becomes deselected for some reason, click the new calendar name in Calendars and then select the name in the Details pane and begin typing.

Create new calendars and calendar groups: You can use a calendar group to logically group related calendars. For example, you might create a group called Personal and lump calendars such as Home, Health, and Vacations inside. Or you might have a work group within which you’d create calendars called Meetings, Work Trips, or whatever. To create a group, click the New Group button in the Windows Calendar navigational control (or, select File -> New -> Group from the menu system). Groups appear in the Calendars section of the Navigation pane as small folders. By default, groups will be empty. You can drag existing folders in and out of groups. But if you want to create a new calendar inside of an existing group, you can do so: Simply select the group folder first, and then click the New Calendar button. In article 20-3, you can see how one might organize a large number of calendars and groups. Here’s one excellent use for groups. Later in this article, we discuss ways that you can subscribe to calendars that have been published online by organizations and individuals. We recommend creating groups for these subscribed calendars in order to keep them separated from your personally created calendars. For example, you might create a group called Subscribed Calendars, Sporting Events, or something similar.

Understanding Calendar Views and Navigation Windows Calendar supports the following four basic view styles:

Day view: Presents a top-down view style segregated into 30-minute slices, 20-4.

Week view, shown in article 20-5, divides the display into seven columns, one for each day of the week (compared with five for

Work Week view) As with Day view, the view is segregated into 30-minute slices of time from top to bottom.

Work Week view: The same as the Week view, except the display is divided into five columns, one for each workday of the week.

Month view: The central pane of Windows Calendar is divided up into a standard monthly calendar view, where each day of the month is denoted by a rectangular shape. Month view is shown in article 20-6. In Week view, Work Week view, and Month view, the currently selected day is demarked by bold blue lines. By default, this day is set to the current day. If you select other days for various reasons and want to return to the default display, click the Go To Today button, which is the blue circle in the bottom center of the Windows Calendar window. When you do so, the current day is selected. If jumping directly to today isn’t exactly what you’re looking for, you can also cause Windows Calendar to jump to any date of your choosing. To do so, select the View menu (not the View toolbar button) and then Go To Date. Then, in the resulting dialog box, simply pick the date you want as well as the view style you’d like displayed. The little calendar found in the Date section of the Navigation Pane can be used to view different months without changing the main calendar view. If you look at this little calendar, you’ll see small arrows to the left and right of the month name. Click them to navigate back and forth, respectively, from month to month.

Hiding and Viewing Calendars When you have a number of calendars working, you may sometimes want to hide certain calendars in the main calendar view. Notice that each calendar and group has a check box next to its name in the Calendars section of the Navigation pane. When a calendar or group is checked, appointments contained within will display normally within the main calendar view. But when you uncheck a calendar or group, those items will be hidden.

Configuring Windows Calendar Windows Calendar offers a variety of configuration options. You can hide the Navigation and Details panes if you’d like, although we don’t recommend doing so. To hide these panes, click the View button in the Windows Calendar toolbar. When you do so, a short menu pops up, 20-7. From this menu, you can toggle both the Navigation and Details panes (you can toggle these panes via the View menu) and perform other tasks. To access other Windows Calendar options, you’ll need to visit the application’s Options window, which is curiously found by navigating to File -> Options in the menu. The Options window is shown in article 20-8. Here, you can set a variety of options related to calendars, appointments, and tasks. For example, you can determine which day is visually displayed as the first day of the week (Sunday by default), and the hours at which the day begins and ends. We’ll examine the appointment and task options later in this article.

Working with Appointments Within each calendar you use in Windows Calendar, you will create various appointments. An appointment is an event that occurs on a specific date or over a range of dates. Appointments can have static beginning and end times - like a meeting that runs from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. - or be all-day events. Appointments also have other characteristics. For example, you might create an appointment for an event that occurs repeatedly, like a birthday or anniversary. And you can choose to be alerted when specific appointments are coming up. There are various ways to create a new appointment in Windows Calendar, but how you do so matters little because you can change any appointment details during the creation process. Say you want to schedule a meeting for 9:00 a.m. next Monday. One way to do so would be to select the appropriate calendar and then navigate to the specific date in Day view. Then, position the mouse cursor over the time at which you’d like the appointment to begin. Now, double-click to start creating the new appointment. 20-9, two things happen when you do this. First, a new appointment appears within the center calendar view and the name of the appointment is highlighted. Second, information about the new appointment appears in the Details pane.

Examining Appointment Details You can edit the following characteristics of the appointment:

Name: This is how you identify an appointment. You can use any name you’d like, such as Meeting With Sarah, Car To Shop, or Flight To Phoenix.

Location: As with the name, this entry can contain any text value. So you might use Phone for phone calls, Meeting Room 133, American Airlines Flight 133, or whatever you like.

Calendar: Specifies the calendar to which the appointment will be attached. If you use multiple calendars, you can drop down the list and pick the appropriate calendar.

URL: If there is a web address associated with the appointment, you can enter it here.

Appointment Information: In this section, you specify the starting and ending times (and days) or whether it’s an all-day event. You can also determine whether the appointment repeats. If it does, you can choose between Every day ( 20-10), Weekly, Monthly, Yearly, or Advanced. If you select the latter option, the Recurrence dialog appears letting you fine-tune its repetition characteristics.

Reminder: If you’d like Windows Calendar to pop up a reminder dialog box at a specified interval before an appointment, this drop-down box will enable you configure it. Allowable reminder times include 0, 5, 15, and 30 minutes; 1, 2, and 4 hours; 1, 2, and 4 days; 1 and 2 weeks, or On date, the latter of which triggers a reminder at the start of the day of the appointment. When the Reminder dialog box does appear, 20-11, you’ll have the opportunity to snooze the reminder to a later time, dismiss it, or view the item. This dialog box is identical to the Reminder dialog used by Microsoft Outlook, incidentally.

Participants: This feature integrates with the Contacts database in Windows Vista, allowing you to add people from your address article to the appointment.

Notes: This large text entry area enables you to write or paste in large blocks of text that may be pertinent to the appointment. After you’ve edited a new appointment, you might notice small icon-like symbols in the colored blocks that represent the appointment in the calendar view. For example, if you specify a reminder, a small alarm clock icon will appear. You can get a bit more information about a particular appointment by moving the mouse cursor over it. When you do so, a small balloon help window will appear and display the name, location, and time of the appointment. This is especially useful in Month view, when you can’t see start and end times for individual appointments. Also, the display of appointments will vary according to their type. Appointments with start and end times will appear as colored rectangles in the calendar view. But all-day and multi-day events will appear in the upper well of the Day and Week views. In Month view, multi-day events will visually expand across all of the applicable days, 20-12. If you’d like to view or edit an appointment at a later time, just select it in the calendar view. You’ll see the appointment details appear in the Details pane. If you just need to edit the name, simply double-click the appointment in the calendar view. The appointment name will be highlighted, enabling you to type a new name.

Configuring Appointments You can access exactly two appointment-related options in the Windows Calendar Options dialog box, which is available via the Tools menu. In this dialog box, you can specify the starting length of new appointments (the default is one hour) and the default reminder time (the default is none). This is handy if your new appointments typically share common characteristics. If you almost always want to be reminded about an appointment one day early, for example, you could change the default reminder value to 1 day. This won’t prevent you from changing this value on an appointment-by-appointment basis, of course.

Taking Calendar to Task with Tasks In addition to scheduling appointment events, Windows Calendar also enables you to configure various tasks. As its name suggests, a task is a to-do item that you want to ensure gets completed. As with appointments, you can set reminders for tasks, and can configure individual tasks to repeat at regular intervals. When you complete a task, you can mark it as completed from within Windows Calendar. Like appointments, tasks are associated with calendars. This makes sense if you think about it. If you do choose to organize Windows Calendar with various calendars, it’s likely you’ll want to associate certain tasks with home, work, or whatever other categories you may choose to use. That said, tasks are relegated to the Tasks section of the Navigation pane and don’t get added to the main calendar view.

Creating Tasks To create a new task, first select a calendar in the Calendars section of the Navigation pane. Then, click the New Task button in the Windows Calendar toolbar. (There are other ways to initiate a new task. You can right-click an empty spot in the Tasks section and choose New Task. Or, simply select File -> New -> Task from the Windows Calendar menu.) However you do it, a new task will appear in Tasks with its name highlighted for editing, 20-13. Additionally, information about the task appears in the Details pane so you can configure it as needed. In the Details pane, you’ll see a number of options for your newly created task. The following options are available:

Name: This is how you identify the task. You can use any name you’d like.

Calendar: This specifies the calendar to which the task is attached.

URL: If there is a web address associated with the task, you can enter it here.

Task Information: In this section, you specify whether the task is completed, a priority rating (Low, Medium, High, or None), and optional start and end dates (but not times). When a task is marked as completed, that task will feature a check mark in the Tasks section. If you want to be reminded of an upcoming task you need to complete, it often makes sense to set up at least a start date for the task. That way, when you enter a reminder time in the next section, it will have something to work from.

Reminder: As with appointments, you can configure Windows Calendar to remind you when tasks are incomplete. These reminders behave identically to appointment reminders.

Notes: This large text entry area enables you to write or paste in large blocks of text that may be pertinent to the task. So what’s the difference between a task and an appointment? Appointments typically come and go at specific times, but tasks are often more open-ended and come with a completion requirement. Also, appointments can involve other people. With a task, you’re on your own.

Configuring Tasks You can configure a number of task-related features from the Options dialog box for Windows Calendar. These options include whether and when to hide completed tasks (which might otherwise clutter up the Tasks section if you’re highly productive), the default reminder time, and the default color to use to mark a task that’s overdue. That’s right. Windows Calendar can get nasty if you don’t keep on top of your tasks. There’s another option in the Options dialog box that’s pertinent to tasks. In the Calendar section of this dialog box, you’ll see an option titled Reminders should show when Windows Calendar is not running. For the most part, you will want to ensure that this option is enabled. Otherwise, you’d have to think to run Windows Calendar for task (and appointment) reminders to pop up. That kind of defeats the purpose of a reminder. You can also change how tasks appear in the Task section of the Navigation pane. If you right-click in this area and choose Sort By, you’ll see that you can sort by due date, priority, title, and calendar name.

Sharing Calendars So far, everything we’ve covered in this article will be familiar to you if you’ve used an application such as Microsoft Outlook or even the calendar functionality of a web mail solution such as Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. But what really sets Windows Calendar apart from those products is that Windows Calendar adheres to the iCal Internet-based calendaring standard. This means that it’s extremely easy to share calendars with people from all over the world, as long as they too use Windows Calendar or another application (such as Apple iCal or Mozilla Sunbird) that also respects this standard.