Windows Calendar  

Windows Calendar

Sometimes it doesn't feel like there are 24 hours in the day. As the pace of life speeds up both at work and at home, many people find it helpful to use a PC-based calendar to manage their time and coordinate schedules with family, friends, and colleagues.

Windows Calendar is a flexible, easy-to-use calendar built directly into the Windows Vista operating system. It lets you plan and manage all of your activities and coordinate your schedule with others. Windows Calendar also lets you create a personal task list and receive automatic notifications and reminders about specific tasks and upcoming appointments.

Windows Calendar has a broad range of features to help you manage your personal schedule.

Manage your schedule, sync up with other calendars, and make sure you never miss another appointment using Windows Calendar.

Personal time management

Windows Calendar lets you easily create appointments. Once an appointment is on your calendar, you can set up an alert to remind you that the appointment is approaching. Set Windows Calendar to alert you minutes, hours, or even days ahead of time, depending on how much advance notice you want.

You can also set up recurring appointments. Perhaps you attend a weekly book club meeting, have a standing haircut appointment every six weeks, or pay your mortgage on the same day each month. With Windows Calendar, you can create one appointment, and then have the calendar set up a series of similar appointments at the intervals you choose.

Windows Calendar includes a personal task list, which makes it easy to organise and manage the things you need to do. For each task on your list, you can include a description of what you need to do, set a deadline for completion, choose a priority ranking so you tackle the most important tasks first, and keep track of your progress. You can also set reminders to let you know when a task is due. And as you complete each task, simply check it off your list and have the satisfaction of watching it disappear.

Shared calendars

Windows Calendar provides individual calendars for multiple people. This is especially helpful for families or other groups of people who share a single PC. Windows Calendar makes it easy for those who use the same computer to coordinate their personal schedules, letting them compare any or all of their personal calendars side by side, in a single view.

Imagine a busy family with two parents and three children. Because everyone in the family has access to a shared PC running Windows Vista, each family member can use Windows Calendar to set up and manage his or her own personal schedule. Windows Calendar also lets each person in the family view other family members' calendars, either selectively or all at once.

As the parents plan for the week ahead, they can overlay their children's and their own calendars to see what everyone in the family has planned, and make sure no one overlooks any important activities. After reviewing all of the schedules, they may notice that they need to schedule time to attend one child's soccer game, another's school play, and a parent-teacher conference for the third child. Or the parents may compare their schedules only with each other's to make sure at least one of them will be home by a certain time each evening. Appointments from each calendar are displayed in a different color, making it easy to tell whose schedule each item belongs to.

Calendar subscriptions and publishing

Windows Calendar is fully compatible with the popular .iCalendar format, which lets you import and export calendar information to and from other applications and Web sites.

Using Windows Calendar, you can subscribe to calendars hosted on Web sites in the .iCalendar format, and then view those calendars alongside your own. For example, you could subscribe to the season schedule of your favourite professional baseball team, the activities calendar for your child's middle school, or the annual schedule of a civic organisation whose meetings you attend—and automatically stay up to date with any changes in those events.

The .iCalendar compatibility of Windows Calendar also makes it easy to publish your own calendar on the Internet through a Web host. If, for example, you chair a committee, organise a carpool, or coach your child's basketball team, you can use one of the calendar views in Windows Calendar to create a schedule and then publish it to the Web so that others can see and share it. If you want, you can publish your personal schedule with password protection, so that only designated friends and family members can access and view it.

E-mail invitations

With Windows Calendar, you can use e-mail to send and receive appointments and invitations to friends and family members. This feature simplifies and streamlines personal time management.