Windows® 7 Secrets®

Chapter 22. Managing Your Schedule

In This Chapter

• Exploring Windows Live Calendar

• Managing your schedule with Calendar in Windows Live Mail

• Working with events

• Managing to-do items

• Sharing calendars

• Printing calendars

Although operating systems such as Linux and Mac OS X have offered calendaring applications for years, Microsoft has historically sold such functionality as part of its Office and Works productivity suites instead of adding it directly to Windows. In Windows Vista, however, the company reversed course, and briefly offered Windows users an application-based calendaring solution as part of their favorite operating system. Sadly, this application, Windows Calendar, was removed from Windows 7. But fear not: in addition to its Windows Live Calendar Web service (part of the company's wider Windows Live efforts), Microsoft also offers an application-based calendaring solution as part of the Windows Live Essentials suite. Oddly enough, it's called Windows Live Mail, and while it can, of course, be used for e-mail and contacts management, as described in Chapter 21, this application also provides attractive and full-featured calendaring options, including tasks functionality, the capability to subscribe to remote calendars, and even a way to publish your own calendars for others to use. This chapter examines this interesting and useful new Windows 7 application and the Web service on which it's based.

Understanding Calendaring

If you've ever used the Calendar component in Microsoft ...