Windows 7 : Managing Your Schedule - Working with Events

Within each calendar, you can create various events. An event is an appointment or other occasion that occurs on a specific date or over a range of dates. Events can have static beginning and ending times—for example, a meeting that runs from 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 a.m.—or be all-day events. Events also have other characteristics. For example, you might create an event for something that occurs repeatedly, such as a birthday or anniversary.

There are various ways to create a new event in Calendar, but how you do so matters little because you can change any event details during the creation process. For example, sup-pose you want to schedule a meeting for 9:00 a.m. next Monday. One way to do so would be to select the appropriate calendar and then navigate to the specific date in Day view. Then, position the mouse cursor over the time at which you'd like the appointment to begin, and double-click to start creating the new appointment. As shown in Figure 1, the New Event window appears, letting you enter details about the event.

Figure 1. The New Event window

You can also create a new event by selecting the appropriate calendar in the Navigation pane and then selecting New event from the pop-up menu that appears. Or, you can right-click the Calendar view and choose New event or New all-day event. Or, click the New toolbar button while in Calendar view.

1. Examining Event Properties

You can edit the following characteristics of an event:

• Subject: This is how you identify an event. You can use any title you'd like, such as Meeting with Sarah, Paul's birthday, or Flight to Paris.

• Location: As with the title, this entry can contain any text value (such as Phone, for phone calls; Meeting Room 133; American Airlines Flight 133; or whatever). Go nuts, it's your calendar. You can even leave it blank.

• Start: Events start on a particular day and, optionally, at a particular time. Allday events do not have a start (or end) time, so you can click the All day option if that's the case.

• End: Events also end on a particular day and, optionally, at a particular time.

• Calendar: This is a drop-down list box where you specify the calendar to which the event will be attached. If you use multiple calendars, you can drop down the list and pick the appropriate calendar.

• Availability: With this drop-down, you can specify if you will be busy (the default), free, tentative, or away for the duration of the event.

• Recurrence: This option allows you to specify the frequency with which the event recurs. Many events will be one-time affairs, so you can leave this option on its default value of No recurrence. But Calendar offers a wealth of possibilities for events that do recur, including daily, every weekday, weekly, every two weeks, and many others. Or you can choose the Custom option to view the Event Recurrence window, shown in Figure 2. This window enables you to accommodate virtually any recurrence scenario you could imagine.

  Figure 2. The Event Recurrence window lets you customize how events recur.

  

• Reminder: If you'd like Calendar to pop up a reminder dialog at a specified interval before an appointment, this drop-down box enables you to configure that. Allowable reminder times include No reminder, as well as 0, 5, 10, 15, 30, and 45 minutes; 1 and 2 hours; 0.5, 1, and 2 days; and 1 and 2 weeks. How reminders are delivered and appear is dictated by the Deliver my reminders to... option described in the previous section.

  There is a Send in e-mail toolbar button in the New Event window, but don't get too excited: all it does is create a new, plain-text e-mail with the details of the event. Recipients can't use the resulting e-mail to add the event to their own calendars, as you can with a similar function in Microsoft Outlook.

  
  

  Notes: This large text entry area in the bottom two-thirds of the window enables you to write or paste in large blocks of text that may be pertinent to the event.

To save the event, click the Save & close toolbar button. The event will be added to the calendar, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. A newly added event in the calendar

The display of events varies according to their type. Events with starting and ending times appear as colored rectangles in the Calendar view, but all-day and multi-day events appear in the upper well of the Day and Week views, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 4. All-day events appear in the well at the top of Calendar when in Day or Week view.

In Month view, multi-day events visually expand across all of the applicable days, as shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Multi-day events visually expand to include all of the days you specify.

If you want to view or edit an event later, just double-click it in the Calendar view. The event window will appear, as you'd expect.

If you just need to edit the title of an appointment, slowly double-click it in the Calendar view. The appointment title will be highlighted, enabling you to type a new title. This works much like renaming an icon in Windows Explorer.