Understanding the Outlook Calendar

The Outlook calendar functions much like your typical desk calendar. You can record appointments, meetings, events, and view to-do lists. However, unlike its paper counterpart, the Outlook calendar can be a dynamic collaboration and productivity tool. A typical oneday Calendar view is shown in Figure 12.1.

Figure 12.1. The basic view of one day in the Calendar folder.

In addition to the standard uses of planning appointments and meetings, you can plan holidays and schedule corporate events. If you pair Outlook's calendar with Microsoft Exchange Server, the calendar can serve as a sophisticated collaboration tool. Outlook 2003 includes some significant enhancements to the calendar, including a quick way to display side-by-side calendars, change views, and share your calendar with other users on Microsoft Exchange Server. Although the basics of the Calendar folder remain much the same as in previous versions, the enhancements allow for faster scheduling and a better visual experience for the end user.

The ability to share calendars with only a few mouse clicks allows Exchange Server users to display up to 12 Calendar folders side by side. Outlook 2002 provided a group schedule tool to enable users to view free/busy data for a group of users. Outlook 2003 takes this functionality one step further and enables you to view a full day, week, work week, or month for multiple users directly in the main Calendar window.

Switching views within a Calendar folder has been simplified by enabling users to display a clickable list of available views in the Navigation Pane. Because the basic menu structure for switching views changed in Outlook 2003 to include several new levels of complexity, displaying the views in the Navigation Pane saves users the hassle of clicking through multiple menus to switch from a Day/Week/Month view to By Category.

Outlook 2003's capability to display all available Calendar folders within the Navigation Pane simplifies the process for viewing other Calendar folders. This chapter explores these new features in detail and provides examples of when and how you can use them.