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Book IV: Using Common Applications 344 22 140925-bk04ch03.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 344 Chapter 4: Checking Your Calendar In This Chapter ߜ Keeping a calendar ߜ Contacting others ߜ Filing data into your address book T hird-party software companies used to offer a number of calendar products, as well as components that come with hardware (like smart cell phones and personal data assistants [PDAs]). Microsoft offered calendar features as part of free MSN or Hotmail accounts. And Microsoft’s Outlook program has included a calendar function for many years, although it has mostly been used in office settings, not by individual users. With each new version of Windows and Office, Microsoft has expanded its offerings with creativity and adaptation. So it is with the Calendar function, a software feature that’s floated around for a long time but only just arrived as a full-fledged, official component of the operating system with the introduction of Windows Vista. Picking a Calendar Which calendar to use? If your office or organization employs Microsoft Outlook (which isn’t the same as Outlook Express), then you may have that calendar system set up and running on your machine. ✦ Enable Outlook, although some of its features are rather heavy-duty tools — kind of like using a backhoe to excavate a flower pot. ✦ Buy and install a third-party calendar program. ✦ Employ the facilities of Hotmail, Yahoo, Google, or other online services. ✦ Use Microsoft’s Windows Calendar. This came about with the introduction of the Windows Vista operating system. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 345 Picking a Calendar 346 Windows Calendar The Windows Calendar has several components: ✦ An electronic appointment scheduler is the program’s heart. Once you enter an event, the system can alert you however many days, hours, or minutes ahead of time. You can also set up recurring appointments: weekly meetings, or rent or mortgage payment dates, and the like. ✦ Reminders can pop up on your laptop, or you can integrate your calen- dar with your lists of contacts so e-mail messages go to invitees or con- firmed meeting participants. See Figure 4-1. ✦ Another core component is the personal task list. With this you can create a list of things to do, along with deadlines for accomplishing each task, and priority rankings for each event. The to-do list is integrated with your calendar, and it can send you reminders. When you finish a task, you can check it off as completed. ✦ You can set up multiple calendars for everyone who uses your laptop — family members or workgroup members. Users of the same computer can coordinate their personal schedules with anyone else who grants them permission to see their calendar. Figure 4-1: The main screen of Windows Calendar stores events, appoint- ments, reminders, and a connection to the Windows Contacts utility. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 346 Book IV Chapter 4 Checking Your Calendar Picking a Calendar 347 Consider a set of family calendars stored on the same machine. Mom or dad can check out the kids’ schedules (at least the information the kids are willing for share with parents) and can add events to their own or to their children’s calendar. Appointments from each calendar are color coded so you can easily see who “owns” an event. As you move deeper into the bells and whistles, it is important to under- stand that Microsoft has made Windows Calendar fully compatible with the industry-standard iCalendar format, which a number of other hardware and software makers, including Apple, also support. This allows you to easily exchange information from your personal calendar with other Windows Calendar users or with people who use a piece of software compatible with iCalendar data. You can also subscribe to free or fee-based web sites that accept data in the iCalendar format. However, just because an application accepts data in the iCalendar format doesn’t mean it uses all the data you collected or that the information is presented the way you intend. Proceed carefully. Here are some of the ways iCalendar sharing can work: ✦ Two or more individuals, or an entire group, can publish their personal calendars to an online site that merges the information into a single calendar. ✦ Someone can download another person’s information (with permission) so their events and data can be displayed alongside your own in your Windows Calendar on your laptop. ✦ You can set up a shared calendar for a group such as a fundraising committee, a soccer league, a poker club, or a carpool. Publish to the Web and others can see. ✦ You can merge commercially prepared event information into your own Web-based or laptop-based calendar. For example, you could down- load the Boston Red Sox season schedule so every game appears on your personal calendar, along with less-important events like dental appointments, meetings at work, and mortgage payment due dates. Calendar information published online can be made open to anyone, or you can grant permission to anyone (or only to those with a password) to read or make changes. Be sure you understand the security process for published calendars before putting any sensitive information online. From the View menu, you can examine your calendar by day, entire week, work week, or month. From the same menu, click the Details Pane to see all the information you entered; click again to minimize the clutter. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 347 Picking a Calendar 348 Knowing where the time goes I remember being in Taiwan in the early 1980s and observing how much of the nation was gearing up to build its economy around building for the world market their own versions of com- puter monitors, keyboards, motherboards, and other technological essentials. They said it was an honor to make an improvement to someone else’s product. To Microsoft’s credit . . . or to its detriment, depending on how you choose to view the soft- ware giant . . . the company has a long history of watching the marketplace and bringing into its own products the best of Other People’s Inventions. The time-honored practice didn’t start there; think of the automobile industry. Within days after the first car hit the road, hun- dreds of companies were coming up with their own version of the same thing: faster, better, cheaper, or flashier. You can’t copyright or patent an idea (the car, the computer, the elec- tronic calendar); all you can attempt to protect is your own particular expression of that idea. Microsoft’s very first product, MS-DOS, was an adaptation of another company’s operating system. Windows was produced in admiration of Apple’s Macintosh operating system, which itself came from an idea that came out of a Xerox lab. For many people, calendars came to the com- puter by way of PDA (personal data assistant) like the original Palm Pilot and its more sophisti- cated cousins, BlackBerry and Apple’s iPhone. (I long ago gave up using my Palm Pilot but still use its PC-based calendar function on my laptop and desktop.) The calendar has evolved thusly: ߜ The original product was an electronic version of a wall calendar. You could enter appointments on particular dates and at specific times and the computer kept track of all of your appointments in a database; you could also print out a schedule for the day or for a week or month. I can still go back at least ten years in my Palm calendar to find out much of the details of my life — at least those I recorded on the calendar. See the accompanying figure. ߜ The next step was a relatively minor one that rang a bell with many users: adding an alarm clock. If you had an appointment for a phone conference on January 7 at 10:30 a.m., you could assign your calendar to remind you a day before, an hour before, or as a fancy French cook might say, “à la minute,” which means at the exact moment you need it. ߜ From there, telephone began integrating with the calendar. Before the advent of VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) telephony, some makers began connecting a calendar to an advanced dial-up modem that could call over the POTS (plain old telephone system) wires. That particular feature wasn’t much used. ߜ The fourth generation of calendars, now current on most laptops, includes integra- tion with your office network as well as Internet services. When you start planning a meeting, you can check the calendars of all of the people you want to invite (assum- ing they’ve granted you permission to do so), and you can place an appointment on their calendar. Further, the software can send out reminders by e-mail, instant message, or by cell phone text message. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 348 Book IV Chapter 4 Checking Your Calendar Picking a Calendar 349 To create an entry, follow along: 1. Click the New Appointment item. A mini window opens. 2. Enter a description of the event. You can also enter a location. Any information you add here can be searched for from within the program; it’s a great way to jump to an old calendar entry or on the schedule for an upcoming date. 3. Set a starting and ending time for an event. On the other hand, an event can occupy the entire day. 4. Enter a potential attendee’s e-mail address in the Attendees list. This invites someone to attend the event. 5. Click Invite. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 349 Making Contact 350 Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Calendar Microsoft Outlook may not work so well for individuals and small groups. I don’t mean to scare you away, but in my opinion, of all the programs in the Microsoft Office suites, Outlook is one of the least user-friendly software applications. The Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Calendar connects just about everything in the Microsoft suite to each other. The calendar is integrated with ✦ Your address book (also called Contacts in Windows Vista) ✦ E-mail settings ✦ The Internet ✦ Most applications (including word processors, spreadsheets, graphics programs, and databases) You can ✦ Customize the calendar a number of ways with color coding ✦ Select a time slot on the calendar ✦ Determine participant availability based on their calendars (with automatic warnings of conflicts) ✦ Create a meeting description ✦ Send invitations Invitation recipients can accept, tentatively accept, or decline your invitation online, and you can track responses. You can share and merge Outlook calendars on a Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 site, a facility used by some large businesses and institutions. Changes you make on your laptop are automatically synchronized with the online calendar the next time you connect to the Internet. Making Contact Does your personal address book have contact names, or does your contact list constitute your address book? This question has no right or wrong answer, although Microsoft introduced a change in terminology with the arrival of Windows Vista. In previous editions of Windows, the e-mail client (either Outlook Express or Outlook) maintained a database that was called the Address Book. With 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 350 Book IV Chapter 4 Checking Your Calendar Making Contact 351 Windows Vista, a very similar — but not identical — utility is now called Windows Contacts. As a user, the changeover doesn’t much matter to you. If you upgraded your system from Windows XP to Windows Vista, your address book automati- cally became a contacts list in the process. You can export the contacts list to a previous version of Windows or other programs that are set up to work with Microsoft’s earlier utility. Do these steps to export Windows Contacts to a version that an earlier Microsoft Address Book utility or another program: 1. Click Export in the Contacts taskbar. 2. Choose between formats: • CSV (comma separated values) • vCards Use CSV for Address Book in Windows XP. 3. From the program where you want to use the file, click Import and specify the data location. See Figure 4-2. In addition to being a simple database for information about your friends and business acquaintances, the Contacts folder functions as the address book for Windows Mail — Outlook Express’s successor. In the process of creating an e-mail message in Windows Mail, you can select a recipient from the list maintained by Windows Contacts. Figure 4-2: The Family tab allows you to track important dates and names of family members or friends and business acquain- tances. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 351 Making Contact 352 Here are the items of information that each Contacts page can store: ✦ The contact’s full name, along with a job or professional title and a nickname. See Figure 4-3. ✦ One or more e-mail addresses. You can store as many e-mail addresses as you want for a contact; one as the default e-mail address, which your program uses unless you tell it otherwise. ✦ A photo, uploaded from your system. ✦ Home address, wired and cell phone numbers, and personal or business web sites. ✦ Work address, phone numbers, web sites, and job-related information such as job title, department, and office location. ✦ Family information (including a helpful reminder of an acquaintance’s gender — Is D.J. a him or a her?), plus birthdays and anniversaries. (As the saying goes: One of the keys to success in life is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.) ✦ A blank Notes page for any information that helps you conduct business or personal affairs with your contact. ✦ Digital IDs. You can add the equivalent of a signature to messages to “sign” a document for legal or business purposes. A digital ID can also encrypt messages. Importing contacts into your Windows Contacts Windows Contacts can accept data saved in these formats: Figure 4-3: The main tab can hold professional and personal information; you can also upload a photo to remind you of the face behind the e-mail address. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 352 Book IV Chapter 4 Checking Your Calendar Making Contact 353 ✦ .wab ✦ LDIF (LDAP Data Interchange Format) ✦ VCF (vCard) ✦ CSV (comma-separated values) To bring contacts into Windows Contacts, follow these steps: 1. Click the Windows button and type Windows Contacts in the Search box. This is the easiest way in Windows Vista to open Windows Contacts. 2. Click the Import button. The button’s at the top of the Contacts window. See Figure 4-4. 3. Select the type of file you want to import. 4. Go to the file and click Import. Note that any existing .wab files on your machine are automatically converted to Windows Contacts format if you upgrade from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Figure 4-4: The Import and Export functions of Windows Contacts are available as buttons directly located on the main screen of the program. 23 140925-bk04ch04.qxp 4/8/08 12:47 PM Page 353 . accept data in the iCalendar format. However, just because an application accepts data in the iCalendar format doesn’t mean it uses all the data you collected or that the information is presented the. to read or make changes. Be sure you understand the security process for published calendars before putting any sensitive information online. From the View menu, you can examine your calendar. alarm clock. If you had an appointment for a phone conference on January 7 at 10:30 a.m., you could assign your calendar to remind you a day before, an hour before, or as a fancy French cook might