Making Posted Appointments

A large part of time management involves scheduling appointments, and GroupWise provides an easy-to-use interface for creating and managing your personal engagements. Posted appointment messages appear only on your calendar; you don't send them to other people. Figure 6.8 shows an example of a posted appointment.

Figure 6.8. Using the Posted Appointment screen, you can manage your personal appointments.

As you can see in Figure 6.8, a posted appointment includes the following information: appointment date, start time, duration, and place. The time increment (default of 15 minutes) can be changed, as well as the date format. You can also set the appointment as an all-day appointment. In addition, you can customize GroupWise to use military date and time as well as other formats. (See Chapter 10 for more information on customizing your GroupWise environment.) The Subject line of an appointment appears in the calendar.

TIP

One of the best uses for a personal posted appointment is to block out time on your own schedule that will show as "busy" when other individuals look at your schedule or do a Busy Search to try to schedule a meeting. This allows you to clear a portion of your schedule to work on projects that require you to be distraction free.

To create a posted appointment, follow these steps:

1.	Click the down arrow next to the New Appt button on the Toolbar and choose Posted Appointment from the list. Alternatively, in the Calendar view, double-click the time for which you want to make the posted appointment, and you will achieve the same result. TIP If your Calendar folder is open, you can also click the start time in the Appointments field, drag the mouse pointer to the end time of the appointment, release the mouse button, and simply start typing the subject of the posted appointment. When you use this method, the appointment's subject line will also be the same text as the message body.
2.	Enter a subject for the appointment and place more detailed information in the message area.
3.	Fill in the appointment's date, start time, and duration, and choose Post to add the appointment to your calendar. (If the appointment will apply all day, check the All Day Event option.)

You can also set alarms for your appointments. Here's how to set an alarm:

1.	Right-click an appointment in your Calendar view.
2.	Choose Alarm from the QuickMenu. The Set Alarm dialog box appears.
3.	Specify, in hours and minutes, how much advance notice you want. The maximum is 99 hours and 59 minutes. You can also set up a variety of sounds for the alarm. (See Chapter 10 for information on how to customize the alarm.)
4.	Click SET. Notice the alarm clock icon next to the appointment.

NOTE

After you set an alarm, you can change the time or remove the alarm by right-clicking the appointment, selecting Alarms, and then clicking the Clear button.