Calendars are important to me. I use a calendar not only to keep track of events within the current time horizon, but also some events a year or so into the future.

Equally importantly, I use my calendar as a long term permanent record of my activities. My current Outlook calendar goes back to March 13, 2003. That's when I started using the Microsoft Outlook calendar. The version I use is from Microsoft Office 2003.

For many events I often add some simple notes to the entry after it occurs. For example, if its a recurring meeting I might add a note as to who attended, what we talked about etc. Just the headlines. Sometimes I add a new entry for something significant that occurred today, just to have a record of it. I guess this type of usage changes it from a calendar to a diary.

Just recently I need some specific information about an event that occurred in July 2000. At that time my calendar was the IBM OfficeVision/400 calendar which is now defunct. So I was not able to access it. Sure, it's sitting somewhere on a backup tape of a type which is no longer supported. Even if it was supported, it's not able to restore it to the current version of the OS/400 operating system. So, unless I had available the full resources of IBM, it's not possible to retrieve it.

On Sunday, May 31, 2009, I started using the Google calendar. The plan is to run the Outlook calendar and the Google calendar in parallel for a few weeks so that I can compare them. I don't intend to use any of the fancy features such as multi-user shared calendars, or multiple calendars, I just need a single personal calendar with the function I need.

Maintaining two calendars in parallel got old very quickly. Like about a week. Now running solely on Google Calendar, very happy with it. It's amazing how familiarity can improve one's outlook. Pun intended!

Comments on the Outlook Calendar

• Cannot change any aspect of a recurring entry without resetting all the entries, past, present and future, to the default setting. All individual entry changes/extensions are lost. I mean ANY aspect, even a time change. This means that there is no way to cancel all future occurrences of a recurring entry with No End date specified without losing years of customized entries. This is totally unacceptable. Am I missing something obvious here?

• Times. Recently, while preparing for a month long trip, I started making appointments and meetings at my destination where the time difference is +17 hours. By the time I departed I had about 30 entries in the calendar spread over the 4 week period. When I arrived, I changed my computer to the local time, which Windows handles very well. All of a sudden I had meetings set for times such as 2:30 AM. Yes, all the calendar entries had updated themselves to reflect the time difference. And there is no way to overwrite this. If I set a meeting for 9 AM, that's what I want it to be. I don't need to adjust it the time zone difference. I can't see how this would be anything other than totally confusing even just here in the United States. If I'm on the West Cost and I'm flying to the East Coast for a meeting tomorrow at 2 PM, I don't want it to change my meeting to 5 PM just because I choose to change my computer time zone to East Coast time. This also is totally unacceptable to me. Am I missing something obvious here too?

• Using the Outlook 2003 calendar with the rest of the Office 2007 suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc) adds a level of complication I am not prepared to accept.

• Export to a CSV file works well. They recommend exporting no more than 1 year at a time, not a problem. Recurring entries come across as individual non-recurring entries, so you need to compensate for this. Importing to Google Calendar also works well.

Comments on the Google Calendar

(These topics are a Work-In-Progress)

• It would be great to have a view option similar to the 7 day option where 'today' was always the center column and 3 earlier days display to the left and 3 later days display to the right.
• Backup (later- this issue solved. Can export or grab the 'ical' file. What is the difference. Needs research. )
• Too easy to delete an entire calendar.
• Cannot set a fixed display time range.
• Would like a display mode that uses less height, would like to be able to display 8 am to 8 pm on a 15.4" laptop screen.
• Need to be online to update - This is a biggie for me.
• Only 1 month calendar shows in left pane, I like to have 3, current month plus one each side.
• Pop-up reminders are Mickey Mouse in appearance, don't have a "snooze" option, and don't pop-up later if you were offline at the time the reminder was due.
• Offline mode only includes -1 to +3 month range Offline mode is terrible anyway.