Scheduling With the Evolution Calendar

Of course, you'll want to use the calendar to do more than find out what day it is. This section will tell you how to schedule events, set alarms, and determine event recurrence.

Creating events

To create a new appointment, select File->New->Appointment or click the New button on the left end of the toolbar. The New Appointment dialog will pop up with the usual menu bar, tool bar, and window full of choices for you.

Shortcut: If you don't need to enter more information than the date and time of the appointment, you just click in any blank space in the calendar and start typing. You can enter other information later with the appointment editor.

Your event must have a starting and ending date — by default, today — but you can choose whether to give it starting and ending times or to mark it as an All day event. An All day event appears at the top of a day's event list rather than inside it. That makes it easy to have events that overlap and fit inside each other. For example, a conference might be an all day event, and the meetings at the conference would be timed events. Of course, events with specific starting and ending times can also overlap. When they do they're displayed as multiple columns in the day view of the calendar.

Doing Two Things At Once: If you create calendar events that overlap, Evolution will display them side by side in your calendar. However, Evolution cannot help you do multiple things at once.

You can have as many as four different Alarms, any time prior to the event you've scheduled. You can have one alarm of each of the following types:

Display

A window will pop up on your screen to remind you of your event.

Audio

Choose this to have your computer deliver a sound alarm.

Program

Select this if you would like to run a program as a reminder. You can enter its name in the text field, or find it with the Browse button.

Mail

Evolution will send an email reminder to the address you enter into the text field.

Classification and only applies to calendars on a network. Public is the default category, and a public event can be viewed by anyone on the calendar sharing network. Private denotes one level of security, and Confidential a higher level. Exact determinations and implementations of this feature have yet to be determined.

Evolution lets you categorize your appointments, which can help if you lead a busy life. The bottom section of the Appointment tab is where your categorization is done.

Adding a New Category: You can add a new category to your category list by clicking on Edit Master Category List... and single-clicking on Click here to add a category.

The purpose of categories is to let you view all appointments which have similar activities. To do this, change Any field contains to Has category and enter your category at right.

Clicking on the Categories button opens up the category list. To associate a category to an event, simply click the check box.

Once you've selected your categories, click OK to assign these categories to the event. The categories you selected are now listed in the text box to the right of the Categories... button.

The Recurrence tab lets you describe repetition in events ranging from once every day up to once every 100 years. You can then choose a time and date when the event will stop recurring, and, under Exceptions, pick individual days when the event will not recur. Make your selections from left to right, and you'll form a sentence: "Every two weeks on Monday and Friday until January 3, 2003" or "Every month on the first Friday for 12 occurrences."

Once you're done with all those settings, click on the disk icon in the toolbar. That will save the event and close the event editor window. If you want, you can alter an event summary in the calendar view by clicking on it and typing. You can change other settings by right-clicking on the event then choosing Edit this Appointment.

RSVPs with the Calendar

Evolution can be used to setup group events and help you manage RSVPs.

When you setup a gathering, you can specify people to come in numerous positions, such as chair. They are sent an email which lets them easily reply to you with their response. If they aren't sure if they can attend, they can always reply to the mail later.