Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P38 docx

Chapter 4: Checking Your CalendarIn This Chapter Keeping a calendar Contacting others Filing data into your address book Third-party software companies used to offer a number of calen

Book IV: Using Common Applications 344

Chapter 4: Checking Your Calendar

In This Chapter

Keeping a calendar

Contacting others

Filing data into your address book

Third-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

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

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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

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:

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

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

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

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

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To create an entry, follow along:

A mini window opens

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

On the other hand, an event can occupy the entire day

This invites someone to attend the event

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

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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:

• CSV (comma separated values)

• vCards

Use CSV for Address Book in Windows XP

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

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

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✦ wab

✦ LDIF (LDAP Data Interchange Format)

✦ VCF (vCard)

✦ CSV (comma-separated values)

To bring contacts into Windows Contacts, follow these steps:

Search box

This is the easiest way in Windows Vista to open Windows Contacts

The button’s at the top of the Contacts window See Figure 4-4

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