Section 73. About the Calendar
73. About the Calendar 3 Set the Date and Time The BlackBerry Calendar offers a useful approach to scheduling appointments and meetings and generally keeping track of your time. If you're already familiar with using a similar software calendar in a personal information software client such as Microsoft Outlook, you'll be right at home with the BlackBerry calendar. In fact, you will likely find it beneficial to synchronize calendar data on your device with calendar data on your desktop PC. You can easily accomplish this by connecting your device to your desktop PC and using the BlackBerry Desktop Manager to synchronize the data; see 10 Synchronize PIM Data with Your PC for more details. Depending on whether your company supports the feature, you might have the option of taking calendar synchronization to another level entirely. The BlackBerry calendar has the capability to be wirelessly synchronized with calendar data on your desktop PC. Wireless calendar synchronization is an option on the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. If you have access to the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, you should check with your network administrator to see whether wireless calendar synchronization is enabled. If so, the calendar on your device will suddenly take on an entirely new level of importance and sophistication because you will be constantly in sync with appointments and meetings. If a co-worker reschedules a meeting or changes the time, you will immediately receive the request wirelessly and be given an opportunity to accept or decline. If you're new to BlackBerry devices, you'll find that wireless calendar synchronization is one of the series' killer mobile features. Even if you don't have access to wireless calendar synchronization, the Calendar application is still a useful tool. One of the things that makes the calendar so useful is its flexibility in providing you with different views on dates and times. More specifically , the BlackBerry calendar offers four calendar formats, which are just different ways of viewing a period of time:
All the calendar formats provide a view based on the currently selected time period. This time period is typically an hour or half-hour period that is initially set to the current date and time when you first open the calendar. The default calendar format is Day format, which shows a list of hours in the current day in one-hour increments . The Calendar application's Day format shows the hours in a day, including appointment and meeting details.  The calendar's Day view shows a day as a sequence of hours listed vertically down the screen. The current time is highlighted with a box around the most recent hour. Appointments and meetings are prominently displayed immediately next to the time at which they are scheduled to start. A small line extends down from the left of the time for a scheduled appointment to show how long the appointment is scheduled to last. This provides a visual cue in regard to how your time is allocated for the day. Along the upper-right edge of the Day view is a series of boxes that shows the current week as a list of days arranged horizontally. As you navigate through days in the Day view, the small week graphic changes to indicate the day of the week. To find out exactly how to navigate through the views in the Calendar application, see 74 Navigate in the Calendar . If you imagine zooming out of Day format to view the current week as a table of dates and times, you arrive at Week format, which shows the days in a week. To switch to Week format, click the trackwheel, select View Week from the menu that appears, and click again. The Calendar application's Week format shows the days in a week, including a glimpse at appointments and meetings. Week format expands on Day format by showing a list of days across the screen to form a complete week. The hours in the day are still shown, but they are very small and therefore can contain only small markers that indicate appointments and meetings, as opposed to details such as the subject, location, and exact time of an appointment. Even with the compressed view of hours in a day, Week format in many ways provides an even better view of your scheduled time than Day view. This is primarily due to how appointments are shown as little vertical bar graphs to indicate how much time they take up. As you continue to zoom out of the calendar, the next format is Month format, which looks a lot like a traditional month view on a print calendar. The Calendar application's Month format shows the days and weeks in a month, including a glimpse at appointments and meetings. The calendar's Month view is more of what you expect of a software calendar in terms of being organized as weeks flowing horizontally to show a full month of days. Month view allows for even less detail in terms of conveying appointments and meetings, but you can still see tiny icons that do a fair job of showing how much time is scheduled for a particular day. The last format available in the Calendar application is Agenda format, which departs from the other views by not focusing on a particular period of time. Instead, Agenda format focuses on upcoming appointments and meetings, even if they are spread out across several dates. The Calendar application's Agenda format shows upcoming appointments and meetings across several dates. The idea behind Agenda format is to give you a concise listing of all your upcoming appointments and meetings without having to navigate through all the scheduled dates. Because more screen space is available for appointments in the Agenda view, it provides detailed information about each appointment, including the exact start time, subject, location, and whether a reminder is scheduled for the appointment.  |
BEFORE YOU BEGIN 
NOTE 
