iCal 101
Creating a New Calendar...
With iCal open, under the “File” menu, select “New Calendar”:
Name it anything you like -
Meetings, Conferences, Travel, whatever. I'll call it
Lectures just so I can name it something
for this tutorial.
Note, if you have never opened iCal before, you will notice that by default it contains already two calendars, Home and Work. You can use the, rename them or even delete them. For this session we will ignore these calendars, or any others that you may have created already,
Navigating around
The left hand sidebar lists all of your calendars, the right hand drawer/sidebar lists all your To-Do items (if you don't see a right hand sidebar click the “Thumb Tag” icon in the very bottom right corner of the iCal window). If you don’t use iCal for your To-Do list there is no need to have the right side sidebar visible, you can hide it by clicking again on the thumb tag icon. At the top of the iCal window you should see some options - day, week, month - I find it easier to maintain my calendars in the monthly view, however to learn iCal it is best to use the weekly view, so click that view.
General Preferences
Open iCal’s preferences by selecting from the “iCal” menu “Preferences ...”.
Under the
General pane, set it to reflect your day -
mine is set to start at 8 and end at 6. Then, and this will
help you to see more when, tell it to show
12 hours at a time instead of the 10 hours from 8 to 6. You
can also change to show less, such as 8 hours, this
stretches the size of the little calendar cells, and makes
it easier for you to read. Of course, you can change this
at any time. However, when you go to print your calendar,
it will print whatever hours you set it to start and end at
- so mine prints from 8 am to 6 pm. I also like my week to
start on Monday instead of Sunday, you can adjust the start
day by selecting the start day from the selection list to
the right of the “Start week on:” option
in the General Preference pane. If you never schedule
anything on the weekend, you can also limit the calendar to
5 days by selecting that option for the “Days per
week” option.
One very useful option to select is the “Show times in month view”. I suggest you do so if prefer that view mode. Now close preferences window.
Customizing the color of your calendar
In the left sidebar, do a right-click (or hold down the CTRL-key and click) on your "Lectures" calendar, select the Get Info option from the selection box.
You'll see a window pop up, to
the right of the Name entry field there will be a little
rectangle of color next to it.
Click on the color and either
select a color offered or click on “Other
…”.
Clicking on
“Other…” does the usual Mac thing, opening
a new window that allows you to set to a million different
shades of pastels or whatever.
I like the
Crayon box. Let’s click on it and select
yellow (lemon), close the color selection window and click
on the OK button. Now, everything you
build in this calendar will be the color you just set. More
later on why this is a helpful tool.
Let's start setting up a day
Picking a day...
...any day - today would be a good day. We're just gonna play with this. You can delete this calendar later and start fresh, so don't worry about messing this up. So to review, your hours should be set in preferences, and you should be viewing your calendar in the weekly view.Creating an event
Move the cursor and double click in a block at a specific time, such as 7:30.
A colorful little event cell
pops up.
Type “iCal
Basics” right in the little cell and hit the
Return key.
By default a new event has a
duration of 60 minutes. If you selected the start time of
the block to be 7:30, the end time will be automatically
8:30. You can adjust the event cell to change the time
related information. Put your cursor at the bottom of the
cell, click an hold your mouse/touch pad button. You can
now stretch it or shrink it to fit the time you want to
spend on this. You can do this at the top of the cell too.
Set your event block to 30 minutes duration - starting at
7:30. You could drag this event block cell to anywhere now,
drag and drop just like in all else Mac. You could drag it
to a new time, or you can drag it to a new calendar. Ok, so
you've created an event named "iCal
Basics" and you've sized it to the correct start
and end time. Now, let's customize it!
Making iCal work for you
Double-click on the newly
created event block to open up its information window. This
is where you'll do all of the nitty gritty work for
whatever event cell you have selected. First let’s check to
make sure the title, start and end times are correct, if
not correct it now. Enter for the location “Dublin
Office”.
Go to repeat. Click those
little arrows there. Scroll down to
Custom.
Let's say you want this event
block to be on Wed, Thur,
and Fri but not on Monday and Tuesday
'cause you have something else on these days. Click the
days you want this event block to repeat on and click OK.
We're not done here though.
In the same window where it
says "end" (and right now it says
"never") click the little arrows again.
Click "on date" and now reset the date to
whatever you'd like. You can repeat out for the end of your
year, or a week, or you can just repeat indefinitely. For
this example let’s select “08/30/2008”.
Notes...or...Where do I type the "stuff"...
Still in the info window, go down to "note" - click on the word, type in some detailed information about your lessons here. It is deceiving in how it looks, but you just start typing there and it expands to fit your notes. You can add a detailed description (such as “iCal 101 Basics presentation for users that have never used iCal to allow them to manage their iCal calendars”), even lesson notes and page numbers, names, whatever here. This is the detail part that shows up when you go to print your iCal page, it's what makes iCal perfect for detailed planning! Play around with it. If you're still having trouble visualizing how the notes section works, type in each of your colleagues names followed by a return and that helps you see that the notes section can hold a number of details for you.
Recap
Now, you've set up a event block, set it to repeat, and have added details that provide details about the event block. All of those details repeat with your lesson block. That may or may not work well for you, in which case you may have to tweak each repeat block.
Finish building the imaginary day
Go through and make some more event blocks naming them as you go and adding details as you go. We're not done yet, but you've just built the skeleton of what could be your lecture plans for the year! Let’s add another lecture, such as my PowerPoint lecture to the calendar. It will start at 8:00 for 30 minutes, repeating each Wednesday of the month until the end of the year.
All Day Events - what are they good for?
One more fun tool - all day events! Go to the very top of your calendar - see there's one little cell above the gray border and below the date?
Double click in there. You can
put all sorts of fun stuff up here - I use it to add my
vacation days, conferences to attend or any other special
all-day event day. You can add several all day events - the
cell stretches to accommodate. You have the same options
with all day events as you do with the other events you
just worked on - you can repeat, add details, etc. For this
session I will add a Conference that I
will present at which will be this Friday in Santa Clara.
The niftiness of layering multiple calendars
If you'd like a little more definition with All Day Events, try this: go to File menu and select New Calendar - name it "Out-of-Office" and pick the “Cayenne” crayon for its color.
Now, on the left hand sidebar
(looking at the list of all of your calendars, which right
now should be at least four - make sure there check marks
in the "Lectures" calendar box and in the
"Out-of-Office" calendar box. Now you're
viewing both calendars superimposed on one another. Why is
this part of the niftiness, you ask? With both boxes
checked, use your mouse/touch pad and click on your
"Out-of-Office" calendar. Now you can see
both calendars, but anything you add or change will be done
in the "Out-of-Office" calendar. You'll
notice it is a different color from your other calendar.
That's important.
Now let’s move the
“Conference” all-day event from the
Lectures calendar to the Out-of-Office calendar by dragging
the event block (click and hold) to the
“OoO” calendar label in left sidebar pane.
Feel free to go up to the All Day Events section of your
"Out-of-Office" calendar and create a new
event. You can add an activity down in the notes section.
Now, when you view your
calendar and when you print your calendar, you can see at a
glance that the rhythm of your Lecture year is set in a
lovely bright yellow and all events associated with it are
yellow, and your Out-of-Office events are set to cayenne.
It just adds some visual order to the calendar and your
schedules. Each calendar, unique colors, merged into one
useful calendar. Now, if you print while they are all
"checked", they'll all show up in one
merged calendar, all color coded, with all of the details
and reminders for each of your events, all on the same page
(or pages depending on the number of details you've just
added. You could have a new calendar for each different
activity in your life if you want - the possibilities are
endless.
Dragging...
You can drag an event from one calendar to the next. Just click an event and drag it to the calendar you want to put it in and it will move it to the same time, same day, new calendar.
Mail Data Detectors
Mail automatically detects text fragments like addresses and appointments and lets you choose smart actions with a click to create an new address entry or iCal event.
Moving the cursor over the date
information will reveal visual cue within the eMail as a
dotted line around the recognized piece of
information plus a drop down menu triangle.
Clicking on the menu triangle
will open a popup menu offering commands based on the type
of data, for date related information the options offered
are “Create New iCal Event…” or
“Show This Date in iCal”.
Selecting the Create option
will pre-filled the Event entry window with useful
defaults, based on the detected date and using the email’s
subject as event title. If there are multiple dates in the
email body you will be able to click on each and create
separate events, however, be aware that the event title
will be the same as both use the email’s subject content.
If there is a date only the detector will suggested an
all-day event.
Let’s add the dial in
information from the email to the event
note field:
Clicking on the “Add to
iCal” button will add the event to your iCal
calendar.
A nice detail: The URL
data field for the new event shows a link back to
the email message.
Clicking this link opens the
message in Mail. This is very convenient because you don’t
have to hunt down the message in Mail if you want to get
back to it in a hurry to check some details of the event.
Publishing calendars
To make your calendar available to others, choose
Publish from the Calendar
menu.
In the resulting dialog, type a
name for your calendar in the top field, choose where to
publish it (.Mac/MobileMe or your own
server) from the Publish on pop-up menu,
select any of the other options you want, and click
Publish.
When iCal finishes publishing
it, a dialog opens and displays the URL for your calendar:
Be sure to write this down, or
better use the “Send Mail” option to send
an email to your self, it contains the webCal URL used to
allow others to view (subscribe to) your calendar.
Subscribing to other users or public calendars
If you know the URL of an iCal calendar that someone has
published on the Internet, you can add that calendar to
your Calendars list by subscribing to it. You can also
subscribe by clicking links to published iCal calendars on
the Internet or in emails you may have received. To do so:
Choose Calendar > Subscribe
Enter the URL for the calendar
you want to subscribe to and click
“Subscribe”.
A new window will open with a
number of option to choose from. If you want iCal
to update your copy of this calendar when
changes to it are published select from the
"Auto-refresh" selection list a suitable
time period. To complete the process, click the
“OK” button.
There are many published
calendars available. For example all major sport team
calendars are made available for importing, such as the
Oakland Raiders one:
Both subscribed calendars are
bing listed in the left sidebar window under the
“Subscriptions” heading
Deleting an event
If you made a mistake, or simply just want to
delete an event, select the event with a
click and press the Delete key, that is
all there is to it.
If the event to be deleted is
part of a repeating event a action window will be displayed
given you the choice to Cancel the
request, delete only the selected event or
delete all future events.
To delete a calendar,
right-click (or hold down the CTRL-key and
click) on the Calendar in the left sidebar window
and select the “Delete” option.
There is always more...
There are things that I did not mention, such as
creating and receiving Calendar
invitations. This feature requires a separate
tutorial. For now you have learned about the basic features
of iCal and you'll probably find some shortcuts as you're
starting to use iCal. If you want to learn more
about iCal, check out the built-in iCal
Help guide on your Mac (in iCal, choose
iCal Help from the Help menu).
