Paul Thurrott - Windows 8 Secrets

These browser-like navigational movements take place within the context of the current view. So when you go back while viewing your schedule in week view, you go back to last week. Go forward while using day view and you will navigate to tomorrow. It’s all very logical.

Of course, you may sometimes find yourself lost in the schedule, or at least so far in the future or past that navigating manually to the current date will be tedious. Fortunately, in this case, Calendar provides a handy Today button in the app bar. Just click that to return to the current day, week, or month, depending on the view you’ve chosen.

A calendar is only valuable to you if it holds your schedule, so the first order of business is getting this app connected to the calendar service you use. The choices are somewhat limited because Calendar supports EAS-based calendars only.

To access the account management interface, you must display the Calendar settings pane. As with any Metro-style app, you do so by typing Winkey + I, or by activating the Charms bar with the mouse or touch and then choosing Settings.

The Calendar settings pane, provides only a few options, including Accounts, which is what you’re concerned with here. (Another useful entry, Options, will be discussed later in the chapter.)

In the Accounts view that appears, you’ll see a list of configured accounts—just Hotmail by default—and an Add an account link, as in Figure 8-31. Click that, and you’ll be offered the supported account types.

Figure 8-31:Calendar account management

Since this works as it does in Mail, there’s no need to belabor the point, and indeed, accounts you configure here will be configured for you in Mail (and People), and vice versa.

Calendar lets you configure multiple accounts, of course, and the events associated with each account will be color coded in the application. (You can change these colors through Settings, Options, as described later in the chapter.) Additionally, you can configure multiple accounts of the same type. So if you have two Hotmail accounts, for example, you can easily configure Calendar to display the schedule from both.

When you configure an EAS-type account in People, Mail, or Calendar, that account is automatically made available to the other apps as well. So if you added a Gmail account to Mail earlier, its corresponding Google Calendar-based schedule will already appear in Calendar too.

Some calendar solutions refer to events as “appointments.” The terms are interchangeable.

Once you start viewing your various calendars in the Windows 8 Calendar app, you’ll probably want to use this interface to manage your various events as well. And as you might expect, Calendar offers some useful functionality around creating and viewing events, as well as how you can be reminded about pending events.

You can also use the Ctrl + N keyboard shortcut to create a new event.

To create a new event, open the Calendar app bar and tap New. (This button resembles a “+” sign.) You’ll see the view in Figure 8-32, which provides a plethora of items to configure.

Figure 8-32:The new event view

These items, which have been nicely simplified using plain language, include:

• When:A number of Metro-style fields that let you configure a date for the event.

• Start:A number of Metro-style fields that let you configure the start time for the event.

• How long:Here, you can choose a length of 0 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour (the default), 90 minutes, 2 hours, all day, or custom. That latter option changes the Details pane of the new event view to include an End date area where you can configure the exact date and time the event will end.

• Where:Really just a plain text field that can contain any text, this field lets you enter a location for the event, like Las Vegas , Home , Phone , or whatever.

• Calendar:If you’ve configured more than one calendar, you can choose which calendar gets associated with this event.

• Show more:This link provides access to additional event items, including How often, Reminder, Status, Who, and Private.

• Title:On the right side of this display is a title area, which allows you to provide a name, or title, for the event.

While some calendar solutions support rich text and even graphics in the message field, Microsoft apparently never got that memo: You can only use plain text here.

• Message:Also on the right side is an expansive message area that lets you copy and paste or write details about the event.

Oddly, unlike the New Mail screen in the Mail app, this screen doesn’t provide an app bar or any options related to formatting.

To save the event, just click the Save button. Or cancel it by clicking the Cancel button.

Like other Metro-style apps, Calendar provides notifications using the standard, system-level notifications that you see from time to time. As you may know, Windows 8 offers two basic notification types, full-screen warnings and pop-up toast notifications that appear in a thin strip near the top right of the screen. Calendar uses the latter type, and at the configured time, you’ll see a Calendar notification toast appear, as in Figure 8-33. Click the toast and Calendar will load so you can view more details about the event.

Figure 8-33:Calendar notification toast

Calendar offers some useful configuration options. To view and modify them, visit Settings, Options, and you’ll see an Options pane like that in Figure 8-34.

Figure 8-34:Calendar Options.

Here, you can determine on a calendar-by-calendar basis whether to display that calendar’s events in Calendar and what color you wish to use to display that calendar. Note that calendar sources with multiple calendars will show an entry for each calendar.

Like other Metro-style apps, Calendar supports the Metro Snap capability, so you can snap it in a subordinate position on-screen next to another Metro-style app or the Windows desktop. Unlike some Metro-style apps, however, Calendar works quite well in this arrangement, providing a customized layout that matches the thin area provided quite nicely.

As you can see in Figure 8-35, the snapped Calendar app provides a thumbnail view of the month as well as any events that are occurring today. You can also click other days in the month view to see the events for those days.

Figure 8-35:Calendar snapped next to the desktop

You can always type Ctrl + T to “go to today” in Calendar, whether it’s in snapped view or the normal full-screen mode. Ctrl + N works in snapped view, too, for creating a new event.