Outlook 2000 in a Nutshell

Chapter 7. Calendar

Calendar is a time-management tool that provides an electronic means to track and manage appointments, multiday events, birthdays, anniversaries, meetings, and anything else you don’t want to forget. Each of these activities can be one-time or recurring (daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly), and reminders configured as needed. Like Outlook’s other components, Calendar provides a selection of preconfigured views for arranging and sorting your schedule on a range of time-scales, or narrowing the items displayed to a specific type of activity—for example, active appointments or annual events.

There is a great deal of functional overlap between Tasks (see Chapter 9) and Calendar items. Outlook treats each item as a distinct type because tasks (optionally) have a start and/or end date, but have no provision for a time property.

Outlook recognizes three unique types of Calendar activities:

• Appointments are activities that occur at specific times on specific days.

• Meetings are also date- and time-specific, but include other people and sometimes resources (like a conference room or an overhead projector).

• Events are special occasions, such as birthdays, anniversaries, or holidays that occur on a recurring basis. Events can also be one-time activities, such as a project or a multiday trade show. Events differ from appointments and meetings in that they do not occur at specific times.

Items created as one type can be easily changed to another. For example, if an appointment ...