Manage and Share Your Schedule

Manage and Share Your Schedule

Yahoo! Calendar can help you plan your time, manage an event, remember important events, and share your schedule with friends and family.

When you lead a busy life, time management isn't just an important skill; it's necessary for survival. Without the ability to track important dates and times, you could miss out on key events. While you can accomplish some time management with a pencil-and-paper calendar, once your schedule is digital, you can do much more. Yahoo! Calendar Can act as your own personal assistant: reminding you of important dates and times, inviting your friends to a party, and helping your contacts plan a meeting time that's convenient for you.

Yahoo! Calendar (http://calendar.yahoo.com) is one piece of Yahoo! Mail, and you can view your calendar at any time by clicking on the Calendar tab at Yahoo! Mail. As you'd expect, you'll find a calendar there that you can view by the Day, Week, Month, or Year. Your Yahoo! Calendar becomes useful when you start adding personal events.

Adding Events

There are a few ways to add events to your calendar, and an overview will help you know when to use each method of adding events.

Event options.

To add a detailed event to your calendar, click the Add Event button at the top of any Yahoo! Calendar page. From there, you'll find the Add Event form that contains all of the options available for an event. Here's a look at the available fields:

Title

You can include a descriptive title for an event, but keep in mind that you're limited to 80 characters. If you like to browse your schedule by the monthly view, you might want to keep event titles fairly short, say under 10 characters.

Event Type

Choose an event type from around 30 different categories, ranging from Anniversary to Happy Hour to Wedding. The event type you assign will appear on the Event List view of your calendar, and you can sort your events by event type.

Dateand Time

You can give an event a specific date, time, and duration. For birthdays or other events that don't have a specific time, you can set the event as "all day."

Location and Notes

Use the Location field as a quick description of where the event will be. (You can include more detailed information about the location with the Address and Phone Fields.) The Notes field lets you add any extra information about an event. If set, both of these fields will appear when you hover your mouse over an event title in the Day, Week, or Month View.

sharing option

Override your default calendar-sharing option for a specific event by choosing Private, Shows as Busy, or public. Note that if your calendar is private, setting an event to public won't change your overall calendar settings.

Repeating Event

If your schedule has some regular patterns, you don't need to add each recurring event by hand. You can set a task that repeats on specific days or at specific times of the month. You can also set an end date or leave the event repeating on your calendar into the future.

Invitations

You can include a list of email addresses separated by commas, and Yahoo! will invite those people to view the event.

Reminders

Have a reminder sent to your Yahoo! Messenger account, email address, or mobile device. Reminders are great for catching birthdays and other events that can slip by.

Address and Phone

You Can specify a full address for an event, and Yahoo! will use the information to create a link to a map when you're sending invitations. You can also include a phone number, and Yahoo! will list that as well. If you aren't sending an invitation, you can use this information for you own reference when you view the event details.

When you've filled in the options for an event, click the Save button or Save and Add Another button. One important option on this list is the ability to send invitations to an event.

Invitations.

Yahoo! Calendar can also act as an invitation service if you provide a list of emails when you add an event to your calendar. Click Save to add the event, and Yahoo! will give you an extra form to fill out (as shown in Figure3-11) that will let you customize the message in the email to your guests.

Along with your message, the email will include the event details and a link to a Yahoo! Map of the event location if you include an address. Figure shows a Yahoo! Calendar invitation email.

The Yahoo! Calendar invitation form

Yahoo! Calendar invitation email

In addition to sending out the invitations, Yahoo! Calendar will keep track of your guest list. As guests reply to the invitation, Yahoo! will keep track of who will be attending and will display any notes each guest has added. To see the running list of guests, as shown in Figure, click on the event in your calendar and click the View Invite list in the upper-right corner of the page.

Yahoo! Calendar guest list

From the Invite page, you can add more guests, send an email to all of the guests, invite more people to the event, or add any of the guests to your Yahoo! Address Book.

If you need to cancel your event, you can simply delete the event from your calendar. When you delete an event that has a list of guests associated with it, you'll have the option to notify everyone via email.

Quick Add Event form.

If you're over whelmed by the number of options to fill out when you add an event, you can use the Quick Add Event form, shown in Figure, that you'll find at the bottom of any calendar view.

Yahoo! Calendar Quick Add Event

Type the title for the event, choose the date and time, and click Add. This will instantly add an event to your calendar. You can always fill in the details later by clicking the event title.

Tasks.

Similar to events, tasks are listed on the left side of the calendar, and you can use them to build a to-do list. Tasks won't show up on the calendar as events; they're completely independent. You can give each task a due date and a priority, and you can view them all at any time by clicking the Tasks tab.

Time Guides.

You can include national holidays, financial events, and sports team schedules on your calendar by adjusting your Time Guides settings. Click Options at the top of any Yahoo! Calendar page, and then click Time Guides under the Events heading. You can choose which types of events you'd like to include or exclude, including your Yahoo! Friends and Groups calendars. Click the Add/Edit link next to any category to make changes. For example, you can click Add/Edit next to Holidays and change the holidays that show up on your calendar. Choose a category from the drop-down menu to see holidays for other continents or religious holidays.

Sharing Your Calendar

Once your calendar is filled with events, you might want to share that calendar with specific Yahoo! users or the world. To start sharing your calendar, you'll need to set your sharing options by going to any Yahoo! Calendar page and choosing Options Management Sharing. From the Sharing page, you can set your calendar to be as public or private as you'd like, as shown in Figure.

Yahoo! Calendar sharing options

The term Friends on the sharing options page refers to a specific list of Yahoo! IDs you have approved to view your calendar. Click the Edit List link to add or remove Yahoo! IDs from your list. As you add each Yahoo! ID, you can also specify whether the member with that ID can modify your calendar. The term Anyone literally refers to anyone in the world, whether they have a Yahoo! ID or not. If you choose to make your calendar available to anyone, be sure that the calendar doesn't have personally identifiable information that you wouldn't want some stranger to have. For example, you might not want to let the world know when you'll be away from your house on vacation.

You can also choose a default privacy setting for event details. The "Show as Busy" option will let others know you're busy at a specific time, but it won't let them know where you'll be. The Public setting will let others know the details of your schedule. When you're finished, be sure to click Save at the bottom of the page to modify the sharing options of your calendar.

Once you've made your calendar available to others, you can easily share it by sending the calendar's URL. You'll find the URL at the bottom of the sharing options page, and it's in this predictable format:

	http://calendar.yahoo.com/insert Yahoo! ID

Sharing schedules can help a group plan meetings; it can also keep everyone in your family from missing important dates and times.