This chapter will show you how to use the Ximian Evolution Calendar to manage your schedule alone or in conjunction with others. 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. 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 appointments, set alarms, and determine appointment recurrence. To create a new appointment, select File New Appointment 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. 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 appointment 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 appointment list rather than inside it. That makes it easy to have appointments that overlap and fit inside each other. For example, a conference might be an all day appointment, and the meetings at the conference would be timed appointments. Of course, appointments 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. If you create calendar appointments 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 appointment you've scheduled. You can have one alarm of each of the following types: Display A window will pop up on your screen to remind you of your appointment. 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. Mail Evolution will send an email reminder to the address you enter into the text field. Classification and only applies to calendars on a network. Public is the default category, and a public appointment can be viewed by anyone on the calendar sharing network. Private denotes one level of security, and Confidential an even higher level. Evolution lets you categorize your appointments, which can help if you lead a busy life. The bottom section of the Appointment tab is where your categorization is done. You can add a new category to your category list by clicking on Edit Master Category List... and single-clicking on Click here to add a category. The purpose of categories is to let you view all appointments which have similar activities. To do this, change Any field contains to Has category and enter your category at right. Clicking on the Categories button opens up the category list. To associate a category to an appointment, simply click the check box. Once you've selected your categories, click OK to assign these categories to the appointment. The categories you selected are now listed in the text box to the right of the Categories... button. The Recurrence tab lets you describe repetition in appointments ranging from once every day up to once every 100 years. You can then choose a time and date when the appointment will stop recurring, and, under Exceptions, pick individual days when the appointment 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 appointment and close the appointment editor window. If you want, you can alter an appointment summary in the calendar view by clicking on it and typing. You can change other settings by right-clicking on the appointment then choosing Edit this Appointment. Evolution can be used to setup group appointments and help you manage RSVPs. When you setup a gathering, you can specify people to come in numerous positions, such as chair. They are sent an email which lets them easily reply to you with their response. If they aren't sure if they can attend, they can always reply to the mail later. The Task Pad, located in the lower right corner of the calendar, lets you keep a list of tasks separate from your calendar appointments. 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. Evolution 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. 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 File New Calendar . 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.