The Evolution Calendar
To begin using the calendar, select
Calendar from the shortcut
bar. By default, the calendar starts showing today's
schedule on a ruled background. At the upper right, there's a
monthly calendar you can use to switch days. Below that, there's
a TaskPad, where you can keep a list of tasks
seperate from your calendar appointments. The calendar's daily
view is shown in .
Ways of Looking at your Calendar
The toolbar offers you four different views of your calendar:
one day, five days, a week, or a month at once. Press the
calendar-shaped buttons on the right side of the toolbar to
switch between views. You can also select a range of
days— three days, ten days, a fortnight if you want
— in the small calendar at the upper right.
The Prev and Next
buttons will move you forward and back in your calendar pages.
If you're looking at only one day, you'll see tomorrow's page,
or yesterday's. If you're looking at your calendar by week,
month, fortnight, or anything else, you'll move around by just
that much. To come back to today's listing, click
Today.
To visit a specific date's calendar entries, click
Go To and select the date in the dialog
box that appears.
Scheduling With the Evolution Calendar
Of course, you'll want to use the calendar to do more than find
out what day it is. This section will tell you how to schedule
events, set alarms, and determine event recurrence.
Creating events
To create a new calendar event, select
FileNewAppointment
or click the New button on the left end
of the toolbar. The New Appointment
dialog will pop up with the usual menu bar, tool bar, and
window full of choices for you.
Shortcut
If you don't need to enter more information than the date
and time of the appointment, you just click in any blank
space in the calendar and start typing. You can enter other
information later with the appointment editor.
Your event must have a starting and ending date — by
default, today — but you can choose whether to give it
starting and ending times or to mark it as an All
day event. An All day event
appears at the top of a day's event list rather than inside
it. That makes it easy to have events that overlap and fit
inside each other. For example, a conference might be an all
day event, and the meetings at the conference would be timed
events. Of course, events with specific starting and ending
times can also overlap. When they do they're displayed as
multiple columns in the day view of the calendar.
Doing Two Things At Once
If you create calendar events that overlap,
Evolution will display them side
by side in your calendar. However,
Evolution cannot help you do
multiple things at once.
You can have as many as four different
Alarms, any time prior to the event
you've scheduled. You can have one alarm of each type:
Display
A window will pop up on your screen to remind you of
your event.
Audio
Choose this to have your computer deliver a sound
alarm.
Program
Select this if you would like to run a program as a
reminder. You can enter its name in the text field,
or find it with the Browse
button.
MailEvolution will send an
email reminder to the address you enter into the text
field.
Classification is a little more
complicated, and only applies to calendars on a
network. Public is the default category,
and a public event can be viewed by anyone on the calendar
sharing network. Private denotes one
level of security, and Confidential a
higher level. Exact determinations and
implementations of this feature have yet to be
determined.
The Recurrence tab lets you describe
repetition in events ranging from once every day up to once
every 100 years. You can then choose a time and date when the
event will stop recurring, and, under
Exceptions, pick individual days when the
event will not recur. Make your
selections from left to right, and you'll form a sentence:
"Every two weeks on Monday and Friday until January 3, 2003"
or "Every month on the first Friday for 12 occurrences."
Once you're done with all those settings, click on the disk
icon in the toolbar. That will save the event and close the
event editor window. If you want, you can alter an event
summary in the calendar view by clicking on it and typing. You
can change other settings by right-clicking on the event then
choosing Edit this Appointment.
The Task Pad
The Task Pad, located in the lower right corner of the
calendar, lets you keep a list of tasks separate from your
calendar events. Tasks are colored and sorted by priority and
due-date (see for more
information), and are included with calendar data during
synchronization with a hand-held device. You can use the list
in a larger format by choosing the Tasks
button in the shortcut bar or in the folder tree.
To record a new task, click the Add
button below the list. Evolution
will pop up a small window with five items in it:
Summary:
The description you enter here will appear in the To Do
list itself.
Due Date:
Decide when this item is
due. You can either type in a date and time, or select one from
the Calendar and time drop-down menus.
Priority:
Select a level of importance from 1 (most important) to 9
(least important).
Item Comments:
If you wish, you can keep a more detailed description of
the item here.
Once you've added a task to your to-do list, its summary
appears in the Summary section of task
list. To view or edit a detailed description of an item,
double-click on it, or select it and click
Edit. You can delete items by selecting
them and clicking on the Delete button.
Multiple CalendarsEvolution permits you to have and
maintain multiple calendars. This is useful if you maintain
schedules for other people, if you are responsible for resource
or room allocation, or if you have multiple personalities.
Keeping Multiple Calendars
Keelyn, the office manager for a small company, has one
calendar for her own schedule. On the local network, she
maintains one for the conference room, so people know when
they can schedule meetings. Next to that, she maintains a
calendar that reflects when consultants are going to be on
site, and another that keeps track of when the Red Sox are
playing.
To create a new calendar, select
FileNewCalendar.
You can place the calendar in any calendar folder and access it
from the folder view. Alarms, configuration, and display for
each calendar are separate from each other.