Chapter 12
In This Chapter
Understanding the calendar’s different views and functions
Mingling with contacts
We hate to break the news to you, but your iPad isn’t all fun and games; it has a serious side. The iPad can remind you of appointments and help you keep all your contacts straight. If you purchased a new iPad (or iPhone or iPod touch) after October 22, 2013, you also received the iWork suite, which includes Numbers (a first-class spreadsheet), Pages (a terrific word processor), and Keynote (the best presentation program we know), as well as the iLife suite (iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand).
In this chapter, we explore Calendar and Contacts, a pair of apps that aren’t particularly flashy but can be remarkably useful. Space constraints prohibit us from covering iWork and iLife in this book, but check out our online coverage.
The Calendar program lets you keep on top of your appointments and events (birthdays, anniversaries, and the like). You open it by tapping the Calendar icon on the Home screen. The icon is smart in its own right because it changes daily, displaying the day of the week and the date.
You can display five calendar views: by year, by month, by day, by week, and by a searchable list view that shows current and future appointments.
Tap one of the four tabs at the top of the screen — Day, Week, Month, or Year — to choose a view. There’s a Today button in the lower-left corner of the screen, which returns you to the current date in any view. (Also at the bottom of the screen are the Calendars button and Inbox button, which we get to shortly.)
To get to list view, tap the search icon — a little magnifying glass — in the upper-right corner of the screen.
We take a closer look at these views in the following sections.
There’s not much to the yearly view, but it does let you see the current calendar year with today’s date circled in red. You can scroll up or down to see prior or future years, but that’s about it; unfortunately, you still can’t tell on which days you have appointments in year view. Boo. Hiss.
Tap any of the months visible in the yearly view to jump to that specific month, as shown in Figure 12-1. When your iPad is in month view, you can see which days have appointments or scheduled events. Tap a day to see the list of activities on the agenda for that day, which leads nicely into the next section.
As we just mentioned, you have to tap a date to see what you have going on in a 24-hour period — though to see an entire day’s worth of entries, you’ll have to scroll up or down. You can swipe to the left to advance to the next day of the week and beyond; swipe to the right to retreat one or more days; or tap a day near the top of the screen to jump to it.
In this day view, all-day events, birthdays, and events pulled from your Facebook account (if you provide your Facebook credentials) appear in a narrow strip above the timeline for the day, as shown for Florence, Italy, in Figure 12-2.
Your daily appointments span the entire time in which they’ve been scheduled on your calendar. For example, if an appointment runs from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., those two hours will be blocked off on the calendar.
You find out how to create calendar entries in a moment, but for now know that you can hold down on an event and drag it to a new time slot should your plans change. If you have overlapping appointments, you’ll see more than a single entry claim a given time slot.
Calendars are color-coded according to the calendar in which you scheduled the appointment to help you distinguish an appointment you made on your travel calendar versus, say, a work, family, or Facebook calendar.
In week view, shown in Figure 12-3, you can see an entire week at a glance. The current day is circled in red. You can arrange to start your weekly view on any day of the week. Tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒Start Week On, and then tap the day on which you want to start your week (Sunday is the default in the United States).
List view isn’t complicated. You can get to this view by tapping the search (magnifying glass) icon in the upper-right corner of the screen. As you would expect, all your calendar appointments are listed chronologically, as shown in Figure 12-4. If you have a lengthy list, drag up or down with your finger or flick to rapidly scroll through your appointments. If you’re looking for a specific calendar entry, you can search for appointments by typing the title, invitee names, location, or note in the search box above your list of entries (or employ Spotlight to help you search).
Tap any of the listings to get meeting or appointment details for that entry. If you tap a person’s birthday, you see his or her contact information. Sorry, but you just ran out of excuses for not sending a card at least.
In Chapter 3, you discover pretty much everything there is to know about syncing your iPad, including syncing calendar entries from your Windows machine (using the likes of Microsoft Outlook) or Mac (using Calendar, Microsoft Entourage, or Outlook). You can also add calendar entries from iCloud.
In addition, any calendar entries in Facebook can automatically show up in the Calendar app. You will have to visit Settings, enter your username and password, and then make sure the Calendar app in the Facebook setting is turned on.
In plenty of situations, you enter appointments on the fly. Adding appointments directly to the iPad is easy:
The New Event screen appears, as shown in Figure 12-5.
Tapping displays the virtual keyboard (if it’s not already shown).
If your iPad includes dictation or Siri, you can use either of those features to add a calendar entry. See Chapter 14 for more on dictation and Siri.
A carousel wheel, like the one shown for the Ends time in Figure 12-6, appears below the field you tapped.
Use your finger to roll separate carousel controls for the date, hour, and minute (in 1-minute intervals) and to specify AM or PM. The process is a little like manipulating a combination bicycle lock or an old-fashioned date stamp used with an inkpad.
To enter an all-day milestone (such as a birthday), tap the All-Day switch to turn it on. (Green will be showing.) Because the time is no longer relevant for an all-day entry, you won’t see Starts, Ends, or Time Zone options.
That’s the minimum you have to do to set up an event. But we bet you want to do more. The Calendar app makes it easy:
The options are Every Day, Every Week, Every 2 Weeks, Every Month, and Every Year. Tap Never if you are planning to never repeat this entry again.
Alerts can be set to arrive at the actual time of an event, or 1 week before, 2 days before, 1 day before, 2 hours before, 1 hour before, 30 minutes before, 15 minutes before, or 5 minutes before the event. If it’s an all-day entry, you can request alerts 1 day before (at 9:00 a.m.), 2 days before (at 9:00 a.m.), or 1 week before.
When the appointment time rolls around, you hear a sound and see a message like the one shown in Figure 12-7.
Tap Done after you finish entering everything.
When you have the hang of creating calendar entries, you can make the task much easier with these tips:
When Time Zone Support is turned off, events are displayed according to the time zone of your current location.
If you work for a company that uses Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync, calendar entries and meeting invitations from coworkers can be pushed to your device so that they show up on the screen moments after they’re entered, even if they’re entered on computers at work. Setting up an account to facilitate this pushing of calendar entries to your iPad is a breeze, although you should check with your company’s tech or IT department to make sure that your employer allows it. Then follow these steps:
The iPad supports something called the Microsoft Autodiscovery service, which uses your name and password to automatically determine the address of the Exchange server. The rest of the fields should be filled in with the email address, username, password, and description you just entered.
The options are Mail, Contacts, Calendars, and Reminders. You should be good to go now, although some employers may require you to add passcodes to safeguard company secrets.
Calendar entries can also be pushed as part of iCloud.
By tapping the Calendars button at the bottom of the yearly, monthly, or daily view, you can choose the calendar or calendars to display on your iPad. Merely tap the calendar that you want to include so that a check mark appears next to it, as shown in Figure 12-8.
You can tap the Hide All Calendars button when you don’t want any calendars to be visible, or conversely tap Show All Calendars when you want your entire schedule to be an open book. You can also turn on Facebook events (in Settings) to display those in your calendar, as well as display birthdays, including those of the people you’ve friended on the social network.
From the Calendars listing, tap the i-in-a-circle for even more tricks. You can assign a color to your calendar, share the calendar with a given individual (tap Add Person to do so), make a calendar public (by flipping a switch), or delete the calendar.
The iPad has one more important button in the Calendar app. It’s the Inbox button, located at the bottom-right corner of the yearly, monthly, and daily views. If you partake in iCloud, have a Microsoft Exchange account, or have a calendar that adheres to the CalDAV Internet standard, you can send and receive a meeting invitation, though you also need a compatible email app that understands CalDAV and lets you not only receive but also respond to the invitation.
If you have any pending invitations, you’ll see them when you tap the Inbox, which is separated into new invitations and invitations to which you’ve already replied. You can tap any of the items in the list to see more details about the event to which you’ve been invited.
Suppose that a meeting invitation arrives from your boss. You can see who else is attending the shindig, check scheduling conflicts, and more. Tap Accept to let the meeting organizer know you’re attending, tap Decline if you have something better to do (and aren’t worried about upsetting the person who signs your paycheck), or tap Maybe if you’re waiting for a better offer.
And as we point out previously, you can also invite other folks to attend an event that you yourself are putting together.
Meantime, if you run into a conflict, why not ask Siri to change your schedule? For that matter, you can also call upon Siri to remind you when you have your next appointment. Visit Chapter 14 for more on this clever feature.
As mentioned, if you take advantage of iCloud, you can keep calendar entries synchronized between your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Mac or PC. When you make a scheduling change on your iPad, it’s automatically updated on your computer and other devices, and vice versa. Choose iCloud from the Add Account screen to get started, assuming you didn’t turn on iCloud when you first activated your iPad.
You can subscribe to calendars that adhere to the CalDAV and iCalendar (.ics) standards, which are supported by the popular Google and Yahoo! calendars and by the Mac’s Calendar app. Although you can read entries on the iPad from the calendars you subscribe to, you can’t create entries from the iPad or edit the entries that are already present.
To subscribe to one of these calendars, tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars⇒Add Account⇒Other. You then choose Add CalDAV Account or Add Subscribed Calendar. Next, enter the server where the iPad can find the calendar you have in mind, and if need be, a username, a password, and an optional description.
If you read the chapter on syncing (see Chapter 3), you know how to get the snail-mail addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers that reside on your Mac or PC into the iPad. Assuming that you went through that drill already, all those addresses and phone numbers are hanging out in one place. Their not-so-secret hiding place is revealed when you tap the Contacts icon on the Home screen. The following sections guide you from the main screen to whatever you want to do with your contacts’ information.
To add contacts from the Contacts app, tap the + icon at the top of the screen and type as much or as little profile information as you have for the person. Tap Add Photo to add a picture from your photo albums or collections (or to take a snapshot with your iPad camera). You can edit the information later by tapping the Edit button when a contact’s name is highlighted.
A list of your contacts appears on the left panel of the screen, with the one you’re currently viewing shown in gray; see Figure 12-9. On the right, you can see a mug shot of your contact, plus any info you have: phone number, email address, home and another address, and birthday (all blurred in Figure 12-9 to protect Jacob’s privacy). You also find an area to scribble notes about a contact.
When you tap to stop the scrolling, that tap doesn’t select an item in the list. This may seem counterintuitive the first few times you try it, but we got used to it and now we really like it this way. Just think of that first tap as applying the brakes to the scrolling list.
You can change the way your contacts are displayed. Tap Settings⇒Mail, Contacts, Calendars. Then scroll down to Contacts settings on the right side of the screen, if it’s not already visible. Tap Sort Order or Display Order, and for each one, choose the First, Last option or Last, First option to indicate whether you want to sort or display entries by a contact’s first or last name.
You can search contacts by entering a first or last name in the search field or by entering a company name.
If you’re searching contacts with a Microsoft Exchange account, you may be able to search your employer’s global address list (GAL for short). This search typically works in one of two ways:
You can initiate an email from Contacts by tapping an email address under a contact’s listings. Doing so fires up the Mail program on the iPad, with the person’s name already in the To field. For more on the Mail app, we direct you to Chapter 5.
You can also share a contact’s profile with another person. Tap the Share Contact button (you may have to scroll down to see it), and use the Mail or Messages app to send the contact’s vCard, which is embedded in the body of a new Mail or Messages message. Just add an address and send it on its merry way. A vCard, in case you were wondering, is kind of like an electronic business card. You can identify it by its .vcf file format.
Finally, you can tap a contact’s snail-mail address to launch the Maps app and see it pinned to a map.
The people you know most likely have contact entries in more than one account, meaning that you might end up with redundant entries for the same person. The iPad solution is to link contacts. Find the contact in question, tap Edit, scroll to the bottom of the Edit screen, and tap Link Contact. Choose the related contact entry and then tap Link. It’s worth noting that the linked contacts in each account remain separate and aren’t merged.
Hey, it happens. A person falls out of favor. Maybe he’s a jilted lover. Or maybe you just moved cross country and no longer will call on the services of your old gardener.
Removing a contact is easy, if unfortunate. Tap a contact and then tap Edit. Scroll to the bottom of the Edit screen and tap Delete Contact. You get one more chance to change your mind.
And that, gentle reader, should be pretty much all you need to work with Contacts. Onward!