Windows Calendar
This feature is included in the following editions of Windows Vista:
Windows Calendar is a flexible, easy-to-use tool for planning and managing all of your activities and coordinating your schedule with other people's. As the pace of life accelerates at work and at home, many people find it helpful to use a PC-based calendar to manage their time and coordinate their schedule with family, friends, and colleagues. Windows Calendar also includes a feature you can use to create a personal task list and to receive automatic notifications and reminders about specific tasks or upcoming appointments.
Manage your life and time better with Windows Calendar.
Personal time management
Creating appointments
With Windows Calendar you can easily create appointments. After an appointment is on your calendar, you can set up an alert to remind you when the appointment is approaching. You can 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 instruct the calendar to set up a series of similar appointments at the intervals you choose.
Managing tasks
Windows Calendar includes a personal task list, which makes it easy to organize and manage the things you need to do. For each task on your list, you can describe 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 nearly due. And as you complete each task, you can simply check it off your list and have the satisfaction of watching it disappear.
Shared calendars
Windows Calendar enables you to set up individual calendars for multiple people. This is especially helpful for families or other groups who share a single PC. Windows Calendar makes it easy for people who use the same computer to coordinate their personal schedules by letting them compare information from any or all personal calendars, side-by-side in a single view.
Imagine a busy family with two parents and three children ages 10, 12, and 15. Because everyone in the family has access to a shared PC running Windows Vista, each person can use Windows Calendar to set up and manage his or her own personal schedule. Windows Calendar enables each family member to view the others' calendars, either selectively or all at once.
As the parents plan for the week ahead, they can overlay their children's calendars and spouse's calendar onto their own to see what everyone in the family has planned and to make sure no one overlooks any important activities. After reviewing all of the schedules together, they might 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 they might choose to compare their schedule only with their spouse's calendar to make sure at least one parent 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, so you can import and export calendar information to and from other applications and websites.
Using Windows Calendar, you can subscribe to calendars hosted on websites in the iCalendar format and then view those calendars alongside your own. For example, you can subscribe to the season schedule of your favorite professional baseball team, the activities calendar for your child's middle school, or the annual schedule of a civic organization 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, organize 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 others can see and share that information. If you want, you can publish your personal schedule with password protection, so only designated friends and family members can access and view your calendar.
E-mail invitations
With Windows Calendar, you can use e-mail to send and receive appointments and invitations. This makes it even easier to keep your family or other groups in sync.