Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

Calendar

The calendar program that was called iCal for many years is now called Calendar, so that it matches its name on the iPhone and iPad.

Calendar is not so different from those “Hunks of the Midwest Police Stations” paper calendars that people leave hanging on the walls for months past their natural life span.

Tip

Calendar’s Dock icon displays today’s date—even when Calendar isn’t running.

But Calendar offers several advantages over paper calendars:

• It can automate the process of entering repeating events, such as weekly staff meetings or gym workouts.

• Calendar can give you a gentle nudge (with a sound, a dialog box, or even an email) when an important appointment is approaching.

• Calendar can share information with Contacts, with Mail, with your iPod/iPad/ iPhone, with other Macs, or with “published” calendars on the Internet. Some of these features require one of those iCloud accounts described in Chapter 10. But Calendar also works fine on a single Mac, even without an Internet connection.

• Calendar can subscribe to other people’s calendars. For example, you can subscribe to your spouse’s calendar, thereby finding out when you’ve been committed to after-dinner drinks on the night of the big game on TV. You can also tell Calendar to display your online calendars from Google and Yahoo, or even your company’s Exchange calendar.

Working with Views

When you open Calendar, you see something like Figure 19-2. By clicking one of the View buttons above the calendar, or by pressing ⌘-1, ⌘-2, ...