Office 2016 For Seniors For Dummies (2016)

Part IV

Outlook

For a guide to organizing your mail in Outlook, visit www.dummies.com/extras/office2016forseniors.

Chapter 13

Your Busy Life: Using the Calendar

Get ready to . . .

View Your Calendar

Create and Delete a Calendar Event

Set an Event to Recur

Configure Event Reminders

Add Holidays

Print a Hard Copy of Your Calendar

You probably have a paper calendar you use to keep track of your appointments, meetings, and events. The problem with a paper calendar, though, is that it’s, well, paper. It’s limited.

The Calendar in Outlook offers everything a paper calendar does, and much more. You can easily switch between different views (daily, weekly, or monthly), and you can edit and delete calendar items without any messy pencil edits. You can even set up Outlook to remind you of an event shortly before it occurs. This chapter covers all that and more.

View Your Calendar

To view Calendar in Outlook, click the Calendar icon at the bottom of the Navigation pane.

The default view of the calendar is Month view, as shown in Figure 13-1.

Figure 13-1

To switch to a different calendar view, click the Day, Work Week, Week, or Month button on the Home tab.

· Month view: Shows the entire month at a glance. Only the titles of the appointments/events are shown, and sometimes these are truncated.

· Week view: Shows one week at a time. Each day is represented by a large box, with all its appointments and events in it. Your Tasks list appears at the bottom.

· Work Week view: Shows one week at a time, but only the workdays (Monday through Friday).

· Day view: Shows one day at a time. An hour-by-hour grid appears, with the appointments and events slotted at their appointed times. Your Tasks list appears at the bottom.

Choose File ⇒ Options ⇒ Calendar for access to many options you can set that fine-tune calendar behavior. Here are a few things you might want to do in the Outlook Options dialog box (see Figure 13-2):

· Under the Work Time heading, mark or clear the check boxes for the days of the week you consider your “work week.” These are the days that will appear when you choose to view the calendar in Work Week view.

· Under the Work Time heading, set the First Day of Week setting to the desired day. Most calendars start with Sunday, and that’s the default.

· Under Display Options, click the Default Calendar Color button and choose a color for the calendar accents.

Figure 13-2

Create and Delete a Calendar Event

Outlook calls all calendar items events. In reality, events can be anything date-related: meetings, birthdays, parties, and even reminders of things to be done on a certain date. For example, if there’s a show that you want to buy tickets for, you could put an event on your calendar to buy them on the day they go on sale.

To create an event, follow these steps:

1. Display the calendar (any view).

2. Double-click a blank spot on the date you want. An Event dialog box opens.

3. Fill in the boxes provided to describe the event, as shown in Figure 13-3.

· Subject: Type a brief title for the event. Whatever you enter here will appear on the calendar and in the title bar when the event is open in its own window.

· Location: This is optional. Indicate where the event will occur, if relevant.

· All Day Event: This check box is marked by default. Clear it if you want to enter a start time and/or end time. See the following bullet.

· Start Time, End Time: Enter start and end times for the event if applicable. If not applicable, mark the All Day Event check box (if it’s not already marked).

· Notes: This is optional. Enter any additional information you want to record about the event. This might include names of meeting attendees, a list of things you need to bring, or information about the type of dress expected.

4. Click the Save & Close button to add the event to the calendar.

Figure 13-3

If you want to edit the event’s settings, double-click it in Calendar to reopen this same dialog box. Then make your changes and click Save & Close.

To delete an event from Calendar, select it and press Delete, or right-click it and choose Delete, or choose Home ⇒ Delete.

Set an Event to Recur

Some events happen on a regular schedule. For example, birthdays come every year (whether we like it or not!), organizations have monthly meetings, and religious services happen the same day and time every week.

Rather than setting up each occurrence as a separate event, you can create a recurring event. Outlook then puts all the occurrences on the calendar for you automatically.

To set up recurrence for an event, follow these steps:

1. Open the event, if it’s not already open, by double-clicking it in Calendar. The event window opens. (Refer to Figure 13-3.)

2. On the Ribbon, click Recurrence. (If you don’t see Recurrence, click the Options button.) The Appointment Recurrence dialog box opens.

3. In the Recurrence Pattern area, select a radio button that best represents the type of recurrence you want. For example, in Figure 13-4, I chose Monthly.

4. Use the controls to the right of the option you just chose to specify the details of the pattern. For example, in Figure 13-4, the event recurs the third Friday of the month.

A Weekly event can actually occur on multiple days of the week, and does not have to occur every week. If you set it to occur every four weeks, that’s basically once per month, but it’s different from choosing Monthly because it determines the next occurrence by counting weeks, not by counting months. In some months that have five weeks, an event that occurs every four weeks would happen twice, for example.

5. In the Range of Recurrence area, specify how many times, or for how long, the recurrence will continue. In Figure 13-4, there is no end date specified, so the recurrence will continue indefinitely.

6. Click OK to accept the recurrence settings.

7. Click the Save & Close button to save your changes to the event.

Figure 13-4

From this point on, when you double-click the event on the calendar, a dialog box asks whether you want to open that one occurrence or the series. If you choose to open the series, the changes you make to the event affect all occurrences.

If you want to edit or remove the recurrence, reopen the event, and then click the Recurrence button again. In the Appointment Recurrence dialog box that reopens (refer to Figure 13-4), you can make any changes you like. To remove the recurrence entirely, click the Remove Recurrence button.

Configure Event Reminders

Outlook can remind you of an event by popping up a Reminder box. The default lead time is 15 minutes, but you can set any amount of lead time you want. For example, if it takes you 45 minutes to drive to the meeting place, you might set the reminder for one hour prior to the meeting time.

To set a reminder for an event, follow these steps:

1. If the event isn’t already open, double-click to open it.

2. In the Options group on the Appointment (or Appointment Series) tab of the event window, open the Reminder drop-down list and choose a time interval. See Figure 13-5. Or, to turn off the Reminder feature, choose None.

At the bottom of the drop-down list is a Sound command, which you can use to change the sound that plays when the reminder occurs. The default sound is reminder.wav, which is a simple chime.

3. Click the Save & Close button to save the changes to the event.

Figure 13-5

Here’s how to change the default reminder time, or set it to None so that no reminders are used:

1. Choose File ⇒ Options ⇒ Calendar.

2. Do either of the following:

· Clear the Default Reminders check box if you don’t want to use reminders by default.

· Enter a different amount of time to use as the default.

Add Holidays

One of the nice things about a paper calendar is that the major national holidays are already printed on it. When is Easter this year? When is Thanksgiving? You never have to wonder.

You can achieve this same effect by adding holidays to the Outlook Calendar. Here’s how:

1. Choose File ⇒ Options ⇒ Calendar.

2. In the Calendar options section, click Add Holidays. The Add Holidays to Calendar dialog box opens. See Figure 13-6.

3. Mark the check boxes for each country’s holidays that you want. By default, only the United States is marked.

4. Click OK. Outlook adds holidays to your calendar.

5. Click OK to close the confirmation box.

6. Click OK to close the Outlook Options dialog box.

Figure 13-6

Print a Hard Copy of Your Calendar

With an Outlook calendar, you can have your cake and eat it, too. You can not only have an electronic calendar, but also a paper one. Just print it yourself! You can print your calendar in Day, Week, Work Week, or Month view, for whatever date ranges you like.

To print your calendar, follow these steps:

1. Display the calendar.

2. Choose File ⇒ Print or press Ctrl+P. The Print options appear. See Figure 13-7.

3. Check the printer name under the Printer heading. If it’s not correct, click the current printer name to open a list of available printers and choose a different printer.

4. In the Print What area, click the style you want. Not only can you choose from a variety of daily, weekly, and monthly calendars, but you can choose from a couple of other views that are for printing only:

· Tri-fold Style: Creates a compact calendar that shows your daily calendar, your Tasks list, and your weekly calendar, all in a format that you can easily fold for carrying in a pocket or envelope.

· Calendar Details Style: Creates a listing of all the events on your calendar for the day, including all details stored about each one.

5. Click Print Options. The Print Options dialog box opens (as shown in Figure 13-8).

6. In the Number of Copies field, enter the number of copies you want. (1 is the default.)

7. In the Print Range area, enter the starting and ending dates for the printout.

If you specify that you want to print only a few days, but you choose Month view to print, Outlook prints the entire month (or months, if the chosen dates span two months). The same goes for weeks. If you specify only one day to print but print Week view, Outlook prints the entire week.

8. Click Print. The calendar prints.

Figure 13-7

Figure 13-8