Thu, 28 Feb 2013 How to get more from the Calendar app

One of the best features of having a mobile device is that it can help you stay organised. Central to this is the Calendar app, which is a pre?installed program in both iOS and OS X. 

This simple but effective software is often overlooked by many, but if you dig beneath the surface, there’s a lot more functionality on offer than you might expect. Of course, it’ll help you organise meetings and appointments, along with managing and reminding you of upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and other not-to-be-missed dates in the annual diary. However, armed with a few quick user tips like those we outline opposite, you can also make the Calendar app do a lot more for you by amalgamating important dates from all your different email accounts. 

Better still, using Calendar in tandem with iCloud means you can also be sure that whatever’s in your diary will be synchronised across all your digital devices, not to mention your home and office computers. Apple has devised a clever way of working to ensure it’s both quick and easy to bring order to even the most chaotic of social schedules. 

Vital Info

Device: iPhone or iPad

Difficulty: Beginner

Time required: 30 mins 

What you need:

Calendar (Free)

iOS 4.0 or later

The first thing you need to do actually takes place outside of the Calendar app itself. Head over to the Settings area of your iOS device and select the Mail, Contacts, Calendars option from the left-hand column. Next, tap on Add Account… to the immediate right in order to add more email accounts to your Calendar app list.

Moving on to the next screen, you’ll see a selection of different email account listings. This includes all the major email services, so it’s probable that you’ll have an account with at least one, or maybe more, of these. There’s also an option to select Other at the bottom if your service isn’t listed here. You’ll also see iCloud listed at the top.

Pay attention to the pop-up message, which asks whether you want to keep the existing calendars that are already on your iPad. You’ll probably want to keep these, in which case be sure to tap the Keep on My iPad button in order to retain them untouched. You can also select On/Off options for other core apps at this stage, too.

Once you’ve added the extra account, your Calendar app will fill up with all your various appointments and engagements. You can easily look at them in different ways thanks to the tabs at the top, which enable you to select sorting by day or week, month, year or, as in this example, in a simple list format that’s even clearer thanks to colour-coding.

The organisational options allow you to colour-code all the different calendars. This means that when an engagement appears on a page, you can immediately see whether, for example, it’s work-related, an upcoming birthday or a holiday. It’s also possible to delete any unwanted calendars here. However, be careful you delete the right one.

Once you’ve amalgamated all your email accounts, tap on the Calendars button in the top?left corner. You’ll be able to see all your different listings, displayed in whatever colour schemes you’ve chosen from the menu options. To change any of this, simply tap on the Edit button in the top right-hand corner of this pop-up window.