Microsoft Live Calendar
Table of contents:
As we announced a few days ago on XatakaWindows, the new graphics finally comes to the Microsoft Live Calendar, renewing the graphical interface and the user experience closer to the Modern UI style of Windows 8.
I'm going to take the opportunity to carry out a step-by-step analysis of this application for managing my time, and discover the power and novelties that it offers me under this new skin.
Events, tasks, birthdays and calendars
The main screen, which I will always enter when accessing the calendar, is the one you can see in the image that heads this chapter.It's certainly a classic view, where I can see all the annotations that I have in the current month, but with a very ModernUI look & feel.
To register a new event I simply have to click on the chosen day and a small pop-up window opens in which to enter the minimum necessary data. I have to be especially careful not to click anywhere other than the Save button, otherwise I lose the data entered.
To complete the event information – once saved – I can click on the “See details” link to access the complete filewhere to configure, for example, the notifications or how often and on which devices I want to receive them.
And, in this same tab, I can invite or review the attendees who will participate in the event I'm editing.
One of the things I liked the most is that it allows me to register not only events. Otherwise I can manage my tasks, add new custom calendars and even add a birthday type calendar.
Certainly the information that the Microsoft Live calendar asks us for, when creating a new one, is very simple. Little more than the name, the color, a symbol or icon that represents it and the description.
More interesting is that you can receive notifications for each event created – these calendars can be shared as we will see later – or receive an email with a daily schedule of events that occurred in it.
Thus, I can have several simultaneous calendars, each one with its own events or tasks and that I can use and maintain in a particular way, while I have a general visibility of them.
Managing Tasks
Another feature of this revamped Microsoft Live calendar is task management; a simplified version of what we can find in Office and is missing in Outlook.com.
The registration or edition form is simple and concise: the name of the calendar where I am going to create the task, the due date and time, its current status, the priority in relation to the others, and the corresponding notices similar to the rest of the application.
To be able to view my pending or completed tasks, in the right corner of my calendar – under my username and avatar – I access the views, and choose Task view .
Here, too, I can register a new task in a simplified way, introducing only the title of the task, and leaving its extended description for later. And I complete any of them simply by marking it as finished.
In the next chapter of this mini-series of “ Stepping Through the New Live Calendar ”, I'll cover how to share the calendars, configuration options, and views included in the web application.
In XatakaWindows | The new Microsoft Live calendar step by step. Part II
