Chapter 15: Manage Personal Information

How to…

• Manage your life with iCal

• Subscribe to other people’s calendars

• Manage contact information

• Synchronize your data with another Mac

Computers can do lots of things to make your life simpler: they can help you balance your checkbook; let you write letters, reports, and flyers, and print them out with professional quality; let you surf the Web; and give you tools for working with digital media, such as music, photos, and movies. But another way they can help you is by providing tools that organize your life: your appointments, your contacts, and tasks you need to do.

Mac OS X includes two powerful programs that let you manage your personal information. iCal, Apple’s calendar application, enables you to create as many calendars as you need: for your personal events, your professional appointments, your family’s activities, and more. By sharing your iCal calendars, your colleagues or family can know what you’ve got planned and can organize their events accordingly.

Address Book is a repository for your contacts: you store their names, e-mail addresses, telephone numbers, and addresses, and Apple integrates Address Book with iCal and its Mail application (see Chapter 10 for more on Mail) so you have a central storage center that you can use with all your applications.

In this chapter, I’ll show you how to manage your personal information. I’ll tell you how to use iCal to organize your life and share your calendars with others, and I’ll show you how to use Address Book to organize your contacts. I’ll also explain how Apple’s iSync lets you synchronize this information between several Macs, or to your .Mac account, if you have one, so you can access all this data from the Web when you’re not at your home computer.