The Evolution Calendar: Time-Tamer Extraordinaire
To begin using the calendar, select
Calendar from the shortcut
bar. By default, the calendar starts with a display
of one day on a yellow ruled background. There's a month calendar
in the upper right and a To-do list in the lower right. The
calendar's daily view is shown in .
Ways of Looking at your Calendar
You can view your calendar by the day, by the week, by the
month, or by the year; press the calendar-shaped buttons on the
right side of the toolbar to switch between views.
Scheduling With the Evolution Calendar
The Evolution calendar allows you to
schedule events for yourself or a group of people. It can
handle events that repeat, event lengths from ten minutes to
multiple days, and events that have a date but no specific
time. You can set overlapping events, although
Evolution will warn you about trying
to do two things at once. You can also set event reminders so
that you don't forget about everything you've just put into
your calendar. Basically, it can handle almost any schedule you
throw at it.
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.
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. For the purposes of the calendar, an
All day event begins at ten in the
morning, runs until eleven at night, and is displayed at the
top of a day's event list rather than inside it. That makes
it easy to have events that overlap. For example, a
conference might be an all day event, and the meetings at the
conference would be timed events. Events with starting and
ending times can also overlap, however, and when they do
they're displayed as multiple columns in the day view of the
calendar.
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 deliver a sound alarm.
Program
Select this if you would like some additional application
to run 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 means
(SOMETHING), and Confidential means that
(SOMETHING ELSE).
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 when repetition
will stop, and, under Exceptions, pick
individual days when the event will not
recur.
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 clicking once on the event in the
calendar view to select it, and then
choosing Event Properties from the
Settings menu.
The To-Do List
The to-do list, 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.
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 the
calendar window. 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 has one calendar for her own schedule. Next to that
she maintains one for the conference room, so people know when
they can schedule meetings. On the local network, she
maintains a calendar that reflects when consultants are going
to be on site, and another that keeps track of the various
company managers, so that people know where to find each
other.
To create a new calendar, select
FileNewCalendar.
You can place the calendar in any calendar folder and access it
from the folder view.