The purpose of the Outlook Calendar is to keep you from arriving a day late and a dollar short. Use the Calendar to schedule meetings and appointments. Use it to make the most of your time. This article explains how to go from day to day, week to week, and month to month in the Calendar window. It shows you how to schedule and reschedule appointments and meetings, look at your schedule in different ways, and customize Outlook.

Introducing the Calendar

Use the Calendar to juggle appointments and meetings, remind yourself where you’re supposed to be, and get there on time. Surveying your schedule in the Calendar window is easy. Merely by clicking a button, you can tell where you’re supposed to be today, any given day, this week, this workweek, this month, or any month. All you have to do to find out how busy you are on a particular day, week, or month is gaze at the Calendar window. If someone invites you to a meeting or wants to schedule an appointment, you can open the Calendar and see right away whether your schedule permits you to attend the meeting or make the appointment. Outlook gives you opportunities to color-code meetings and appointments so that you can tell at a glance what they are all about. Moving a meeting or appointment is simply a matter of dragging it elsewhere in the Calendar window. By double-clicking a meeting or appointment in the Calendar window, you can open a form to find out where the meeting takes place or read notes you jotted down about the meeting. You can even make a bell ring and the Reminder message box appear when a meeting or appointment is forthcoming. To make the TaskPad, an abbreviated Tasks

The Different Kinds of Activities

For scheduling purposes, Outlook makes a distinction between appointments, events, and meetings. Meetings, however, are not everybody’s concern. If your computer is connected to a network and the network uses the Microsoft Exchange Server, you can use Outlook to invite colleagues on the network to come to meetings. But if your computer is not on a network, don’t bother with meetings. Schedule appointments and events instead. You can schedule the following activities:

 -  Appointment: An activity that occupies a certain time period on a certain day. For example, a meeting that takes place between 11 and 12 o’clock is an appointment.

 -  Recurring appointment: An appointment that takes place daily, weekly, or monthly on the same day and same time each day, week, or month. A weekly staff meeting is a recurring appointment. The beauty of recurring appointments is that Outlook enters them weeks and months in advance in the Calendar window. You don’t have to enter these appointments one at a time.

 -  Event: An activity that lasts all day. A trade show, for example, is an event. A birthday is an event. A day spent on vacation is also an event (is it ever!). On the Calendar, events and recurring events appear first.

 -  Recurring event: An all-day activity that takes place each week, month, or year. Unromantic users of Outlook are hereby advised to schedule these recurring events in the Calendar: Valentine’s Day, their significant other’s birthday, and first-date and wedding anniversaries. Thanks to Outlook, no one will ever accuse you again of being coldhearted or indifferent.

 -  Meeting: Same as an appointment, except that you can invite others to attend. Scheduling meetings is not covered in this article. See your network administrator for details.

Getting Around in the Calendar Window

Days on which meetings or appointments are scheduled appear in boldface in the Date Navigator, the calendar in the upper-left corner of the window. Here are all the different ways to go from date to date in the Calendar window:

 -  To today: Click the Today button on the Standard toolbar.

 -  To a specific day: Click a day in the Date Navigator. You can also press Ctrl+G and select a day in the Go to Date dialog box. In some views, you can press Alt+PageUp to go to the first day of the month, or Alt+PageDown to go to the last day.

 -  To a different month: Click an arrow beside the month name in the Date Navigator to go backward or forward by a month. Here’s a quick way to go from month to month in the Calendar: Click the month name in the Date Navigator and hold down the mouse button. You see a list of month names. Drag the pointer to the name of the month you want to go to. Use the scroll bar on the right side of the window to travel from hour to hour in Day view and Work Week view. In Week view and Month view, manipulating the scroll bar takes you from week to week.

Scheduling an Activity

Now that you know how the Calendar works, the next step is to fill the pages of the Calendar with all kinds of busywork. These pages explain how to schedule activities, schedule recurring activities, and magically transform an e-mail message into a Calendar item. You can find many intriguing shortcuts in these pages.

Scheduling an activity: The basics

Follow these basic steps to schedule an appointment, recurring appointment, event, or recurring event:

1. Select the day in which you want to schedule the activity. If the activity occupies a certain time period, you can select the time period in Day or Work Week view and save yourself the trouble of entering a time period in the Appointment dialog box. To select a time period, drag downward in the Calendar window. To create a half-hour appointment, simply double-click a half hour slot in Day or Work Week view. The Appointment dialog box opens with the Start and End time already entered.

2. Click the New Appointment button, press Ctrl+N, or choose Actions -> New Appointment. When you double-click an appointment or event in the Calendar window, this is the form you see.

3. Enter information in the form. To enter a recurring event or appointment, click the Recurrence button. To enter an event instead of an appointment, select the All Day Event check box.

4. Click the Save and Close button when you’re finished describing the appointment or event. The appointment or event is entered in the Calendar window.

 -  Appointment time: Enter the starting and ending time, if you didn’t do so already in the Appointment form.

 -  Recurrence pattern: Use the options and drop-down lists to describe how often the activity recurs.

 -  Range of recurrence: Describe when the recurring events will cease recurring. Choose the No End Date option button if the activity occurs ad infinitum, ad nauseum (that’s Latin for “unto infinity most nauseously”). In the Calendar window, recurring activities are marked by the arrowchasing- its-tail icon. To change a recurring activity into a one-time activity, click the Recurrence button and, in the Recurrence dialog box, click the Remove Recurrence button.

Scheduling an event

Select the All Day Event check box in the Appointment window to schedule an event, not an appointment. As explained earlier, an event is an activity that lasts all day. Here are some shortcuts for creating events:

-  In Week view or Month view, double-click the day on which the event is to occur. The Event dialog box opens immediately.  -  Choose Actions -> New All Day Event to open the Event dialog box straightaway.

Canceling, Rescheduling, and Altering Activities

Canceling, rescheduling, and altering appointments and events are pretty easy. You can always double-click an activity to open the Appointment or Event form and change the particulars there. And you can take advantage of these shortcuts:

 -  Canceling: Select an activity and click the Delete button. When you cancel a recurring activity, a dialog box asks whether you want to delete all occurrences of the activity or just the activity on the day you selected. Choose an option and click OK.

 -  Rescheduling: Drag the activity to a new location on the schedule. Move the pointer over the left side of the activity and, when you see the fourheaded arrow, start dragging.

 -  Changing start and end times: In Day or Work Week view, move the pointer over the top or bottom of the activity and start dragging when you see the double arrow.

 -  Changing the description: Click in the activity’s box and start typing or editing.

Getting a Better Look at Your Schedule

Here are the various and sundry ways to organize and view the activities you so patiently entered in the Calendar window:

 -  Change Calendar views: Click one of the five View buttons Today, Day, Work Week, Week, or Month to read the fine print or get the bird’s-eye view of activities you’ve scheduled in the Calendar window.

 -  Change views of the Calendar window: Open the Current View dropdown list and choose Events, Recurring Appointments, or another view to isolate certain kinds of activities.

 -  Color-code activities: Color-coding is a great way to separate the important activities from the not-so-important ones. To change the color of an activity, right-click it, choose Label, and select a color on the submenu.

 -  Categorize messages: Assign activities to categories and then arrange activities by category in the Calendar window. To do so, choose By Category in the Current View drop-down list.