Create a family calendar with Windows Vista

Keep your family’s schedule in one place and stay up-to-date at a glance

By S. E. Slack, author and technology expert

Related Links • 4 ways to use Windows Vista at home

With Microsoft Windows Vista, I can now plan and manage my own activities, as well as coordinate the rest of my family’s activities, in a single calendar. Windows Calendar is built right into Windows Vista and offers automated integration features that make it the easiest calendar I’ve seen for groups of people to use.

There are lots of cool things you can do with Windows Calendar. You can:

Keep your family’s schedule in one place and stay up-to-date at a glance

By S. E. Slack, author and technology expert

Related Links • 4 ways to use Windows Vista at home

With Microsoft Windows Vista, I can now plan and manage my own activities, as well as coordinate the rest of my family’s activities, in a single calendar. Windows Calendar is built right into Windows Vista and offers automated integration features that make it the easiest calendar I’ve seen for groups of people to use.

There are lots of cool things you can do with Windows Calendar. You can:

In this article, I’ll show you how to do all these things.

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Overview of Windows Calendar

Overview of Windows Calendar

I’ve tried a variety of methods to coordinate family activities—a whiteboard, a paper calendar, a personal digital assistant (PDA), and more. Microsoft Office Outlook is great, but I’ve found it more useful for my business activities than trying to coordinate my family’s activities. When Windows Calendar in Windows Vista came along, I was thrilled.

That’s because Windows Calendar lets you set up multiple calendars, and then gives you the option of viewing one calendar at a time or comparing multiple calendars. Calendar setup is fast and easy; you just select different colors for each person. When compared side by side, this color feature makes it easy to see who’s doing what at any given time—a literal lifesaver for anyone who needs to manage a variety of schedules.

With Windows Calendar, you can see tasks and appointments for multiple people in a single glance. Each color shown here (blue, pink, and yellow) represents a different person’s calendar. View larger image.

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Set up and compare family calendars

I have set up a calendar for each person in my family, and the integration aspect of Windows Calendar lets me compare our day’s activities side by side, which has been an immense help to me. Now, for example, when I need to know whether my husband can take our daughter to an activity, I just glance at the calendar to check his schedule. Setting up your calendar is very logical and simple.

Here’s how to create calendars for each person in your family in Windows Calendar:

That’s it! Now you’re ready to create appointments and tasks. Click New Appointment or New Task in the toolbar and fill in the required information. When the details for tasks and appointments are filled in, the calendar will populate with the information in the appropriate color for the person involved.

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Subscribe to Web calendars

Now that most of the world has gone high tech, all sorts of organizations are placing calendars on the Internet. Sports teams post game dates, clubs post dates for upcoming activities, volunteer groups post events requiring participants—the list goes on and on. Placing calendars online reduces questions and confusion about upcoming activities and related locations, which is a terrific help for group organizers who often juggle multiple responsibilities along with calendar duties.

If the iCalendar format (.ics) is used, you can subscribe to these calendars and set parameters for how often your personal Windows calendar is updated with new events from different groups. You can find a listing of calendars that can be subscribed to on the Windows Calendar Web site or ask any groups that you’re a part of where their calendars are posted.

To a subscribe to a calendar:

You’ll start seeing your calendar updated according to the update intervals you established.

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Publish your calendar to a Web site

If you volunteer for an organization or have a need for others outside your home to see your calendar, consider publishing it to the Web. For example, let’s say you have three kids who are continually running from one activity to the next. Rather than calling or sending e-mail messages to interested family members (grandparents, for instance), just publish your calendar to the Web so they can check it on their own. When they find an activity that fits their schedule, they’ll attend—and the only thing you had to do was update your own calendar. You can even add password protection to a Web calendar if you like.

To place your calendar on the Web:

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Send appointments or invitations by e-mail

It’s rare to meet someone now who doesn’t have an e-mail address. That makes it a lot easier to invite people to events or notify them of activities happening with your family. For example, if you want to invite grandma to your child’s regional soccer match, you can do it by e-mail as you set up the activity on your calendar. You’ll notify grandma and set up everything from your calendar in one simple process.

To create an appointment and send an instant e-mail notice:

A new e-mail message will appear on your screen, showing INVITE in the subject line and with the appointment attached. Verify the recipient list and click Send.

As you can see, Windows Calendar is a pretty big improvement over previous electronic calendars. Just the ability to see multiple calendars at a glance is a huge bonus for my family—we’ve stopped pestering each other for information and, more important, we’ve stopped missing appointments and bickering with each other over scheduling problems. It can work for your family, too. Give it a try!

S.E. Slack S. E. Slack specializes in simplifying complex topics so the masses can both understand and apply difficult concepts. She is a co-author of Breakthrough Windows Vista: Find Your Favorite Features and Discover the Possibilities. She is currently writing CNET Do-It-Yourself Digital Home Office Projects. She has written five other books.