MacBook Pro® Portable Genius, 2nd Edition

Chapter 9. How Can I Manage My Calendars?

With iCal, you can manage your own time by creating calendars that help you to be where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there. You can also use to-do items to ensure that you accomplish important, or even not-so-important, tasks. As a personal calendar tool, iCal is very useful, and if that's all it did it would be worth using. However, iCal is also designed for calendar collaboration. You can publish calendars so that others can view your calendars in iCal running on their Macs. Likewise, you can subscribe to other people's calendars so that you see all calendar events of interest to you in one place.

Setting Up iCal

iCal is a complete calendar tool that enables you to take control over your busy life and helps you coordinate with other people. In this section, you learn how to get started with iCal, from setting important preferences to configuring your calendars, events, and to-do items.

Configuring iCal preferences

Before you jump into managing your calendars with iCal, take a few moments to configure some of its preferences so that it works the way you want. iCal's Preferences window has three tabs: General, Accounts, and Advanced.

On the General tab, here are the preferences you can set (see figure 9.1):

Figure 9.1. The General ...