Family households can be hectic environments, with each person hurrying off to their activities and meetings. There are many applications available for managing schedules and contact information, such as Microsoft Outlook, ACT!, and Lotus Notes, but such programs aren't free, and they contain more features than the average household needs anyway.

Windows Vista comes with two great, family-friendly programs included for managing your schedule and contact information: Windows Calendar and Windows Contacts.

Using Windows Calendar

With Windows Calendar, each person in your family can have his or her own individual calendar, and you can view other people's calendars via your home network. To start the program, select Start > All Programs > Windows Calendar.

Figure 4-16 shows Windows Calendar with a one-hour dog training class set up for 10:00 a.m. Notice that the left pane shows the big-picture month-long calendar, the center pane shows the current date's hour-by-hour schedule, and the right pane shows the details about the selected event.

Figure 4-16: Windows Calendar keeps track of important events and meetings.

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To share your calendar, select Share > Publish. Fill in the information in the Publish Calendar window, as shown in Figure 4-17. The location in which to publish the calendar can be a Web server (if you have access to one), your local hard disk (useful primarily if that location is also accessible to others who might want to see your calendar), or to a folder on your LAN's (local area network's) shared file area.

The C:\Users\Public folder is a good option for publishing a calendar that should be available to everyone who uses the computer.

Figure 4-17: Publish your calendar so that others may access it.

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To see someone else's calendar, subscribe to it with the Share > Subscribe command. You must know the full path and name of the calendar to which to subscribe. For example, Bob saved his calendar to C:\Users\Public. Another user subscribing to his calendar would enter C:\Users\Public\Bob's Calendar.ics. You can also subscribe to calendars on the Internet by entering the URL to the calendar.

Using Windows Contacts

Windows Contacts is not really an application; rather, it's a folder located at C:\Users\username\Contacts, where username is the name of the account that's currently logged on to Windows. To view this folder, select Start > All Programs > Windows Contacts.

This folder contains a separate file, with a .contact extension, for each user, as shown in Figure 4-18.

Figure 4-18: Use Windows Contacts to browse for and view contact information.

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To view a contact's details, double-click the username.contact file. The properties dialog box that opens has multiple tabs, as shown in Figure 4-19. Click each tab to move among them and enter or edit information.

Figure 4-19: You can view and edit a contact's details in the properties dialog box.

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To create a new contact, select File > New > Contact, complete the form that appears, and then click OK. To delete a contact, select it and press Delete, the same as you would with any file.

Moving On

Congratulations on finishing the course! Now you have a good idea of what Windows Vista offers you and your family, and especially the Home Basic and Home Premium editions. Don't forget to do the assignment and take the quiz, and then share final questions and comments with your classmates and instructor on the Message Board. See you there.