Windows 10 Feature Focus: Calendar

The Calendar app in Windows connects to multiple accounts and helps you manage your work and personal schedules. Indeed, it only works with online accounts.

Note: the content in this article is condensed from the Calendar chapter in Windows 10 Field Guide, which is currently in development. I’ll announce the plans for the publication of this new e-book soon.

To be clear, Calendar works only with online accounts. You cannot use this app to create calendars and events that are local to your PC only. If you do not sign-in to Windows with a Microsoft account, you will need to add at least one account when you first run Calendar.

Here’s what’s happening with Calendar in Windows 10.

It’s a universal app. Calendar looks and works largely as you’d expect. Like many built-in apps, Calendar provides a collapsible menu pane on the left. If you wish to devote more space to your calendar—and understand the controls this pane provides—you can toggle it into a collapsed display by clicking the Menu (“≡”) button.

It’s integrated with Mail. When you create an account in Calendar, it’s added to Mail too (and vice versa). Indeed, these apps are so integrated they are uninstalled (and then reinstalled) as a set. You might think of them, together with the People app, as a mobile version of Outlook.

Multiple views. Calendar offers multiple views, including Day, Work Week, Week, and Month, plus some neat multi-day (2, 3, 4, 5, and 6-day) views via a subtle drop-down next to the Day menu item. You can configure what constitutes a work week and the first day of the week, too.

It supports multiple accounts. If you do sign-in with a Microsoft account, the calendar for that account is automatically configured. But you can also add any number of Outlook.com (Hotmail, Live.com and MSN), Exchange (which includes corporate Exchange accounts, Office 365 for business or, confusingly, Outlook.com), Google Calendar, and Apple iCloud accounts too.

It supports both events and meetings. No surprise here, but Calendar lets you manage events, including meetings—special kinds of events in which there are other participants—which are associated with individual calendars. These events can be quite detailed and can include lots of associated information. You can mouse-over an event to see basic information, open the event for a deeper view, make new and recurring events, mark an event as private—so your coworkers will only see that you’re busy at the time of an event—and invite others, creating a meeting.

It lets you access your events from outside Calendar. Calendar events are also available on the lock screen—where Calendar is one of the few apps that can be configured as the detail status notification—on the Calendar live tile in Start, via pop-up reminders, and in Action Center, Windows 10’s new notification center.

Overall, Calendar is a far more attractive and compatible calendar application than the version Microsoft created for Windows 8, and a welcome addition to Windows 10.