Windows Vista hints and tips

Subscribe to a calendar

Bundled with Windows Vista is a pretty good calendar application. You can use it to store appointments and taks, and to remind you when they are due. It's a useful tool.

It is even more useful when you use it to subscribe to other peoples' calendars. Anyone can publish a calendar to a location on the web, such as a web server, and lots of people do.

There is a widely supported calendar file format that nearly all calendars understand called .ics or iCalendar.

So where can you find calendars to publish to? One place is a website called iCalShare, which has a large collection of calendars you can subscribe to. Open Windows Calendar in Vista and then go to iCalShare in Internet Explorer.

Browse the collection of calendars and when you see one that you like, click the Subscribe link on the web page. A pop-up message asks if you want to allow the website to open a program on your computer. Agree to this and Windows Calendar will automatically come to the front and the Subscribe dialog will open.

Click Next and after a few seconds you will be able to choose an update interval. Some calendars are complete, but some are regularly updated and you might want to set daily or weekly updates. It depends on what calendar you subscribe to.

You now have a new calendar in Windows Calendar and the events it contains will appear in the day, week or month displays.

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