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

Book IV: Using Common Applications
344
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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.
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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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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.
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Picking a Calendar
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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Book IV

Chapter 4
Checking Your
Calendar
Making Contact
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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:
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.
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