Overview of Features

Besides its capability to display the various calendar views, Outlook's Calendar tool also helps you keep track of your time by setting appointments, holidays, and meeting dates. Calendar can perform these tasks :

• Set detailed appointments for any time of day. These appointments can be categorized by the criteria you set (business meeting, school event, or family event, for example). You can easily set Calendar to remind you of impending appointments with an onscreen message or even with a reminder sound.

• Create all-day events on your schedule. Similar to appointments, scheduling events allows you to quickly block out days of time, rather than just hours. You can even indicate how reachable you are (free, busy, tentative or out of the office) and whether the appointment time and date is firm or tentative.

• Plan meetings with associates ”in your office or over the Internet ”who also use Outlook. Calendar's Meeting Planner can search each person's calendar and automatically set a meeting time that is convenient to all, and it can even notify everyone who needs to attend the meeting.

• Make setting recurring appointments, meetings, and events a snap. If you need a nudge to pick up your daughter every day at 3:00 p.m., Calendar can set reminders for you with just a few clicks.

Starting the Calendar

As with so much of the Microsoft get-there-from- anywhere paradigm, you can access Calendar in more than one way. The main way to start Calendar is from within Outlook itself. From any part of Outlook, click the Calendar icon in the Outlook Bar or the Calendar folder in the Folder list, depending on the view you have displayed. From the menu, choose Go, Calendar.

Going Through the Grand Tour

When Calendar is displayed, you see the default Calendar screen, shown in Figure 18.1. Your screen might look slightly different; for example, your Calendar view might not include the TaskPad, and the date will most certainly be different.

Figure 18.1. The default view of the Calendar screen.

Calendar, like all the other Outlook tools, has dynamic menus and toolbars. As the situation changes, so do the tools available on the toolbars and menus . What displays is actually dictated by two criteria: the Outlook module you are using and the view you are in. Calendar has seven built-in views ”which you can select from the Current View drop-down arrow in the Advanced toolbar ”with the toolbars varying slightly for each view.

In the default Day/Week/Month view, the Information Viewer has three panes: the Daily Appointment Calendar, the Date Navigator view of the current and next month, and the TaskPad.