HELP DESK
Keep schedule, calendars online

By Kim Komando
Gannett News Service

With the new year under way, now is a great time to think about planning your days and organizing your life. Calendar and planning software can help, but many of these programs leave your life stuck on your home or office computer. If keeping your schedule portable is important, it's difficult to beat Web-based solutions and services.

Yahoo!'s calendar service (calendar.yahoo.com) does the best job of combining economy and completeness. It is free and competent. The calendar offers three views — day, week, and month. A year view also is available, but you can't enter anything into it.

The daily view initially offers only 8 a.m. to 6 p.m time slots to enter appointments and events. However, if you have something planned for 9 p.m., you can enter it at the bottom of the window. The calendar then expands to include that hour.

The weekly view is a horizontal layout, similar to the daily version. It is the least intuitive of the views. The monthly view gives a better perspective of my schedule by showing the entire month in one window.

Yahoo!'s address book is available on the same bank of tabs as the calendar. You can use it for a contact list, because it accepts a great deal of information. E-mail also is available. The whole thing is free, unless you want to pay for extra e-mail storage or a special e-mail address.

Calendars are also available through MSN (www.msn.com) and America Online (www.aol.com). You must join the services to use their calendars. MSN offers the free Hotmail, with which you can create a contact list. You can create a contact list in AOL's e-mail also, which is part of the pay service.

MSN's calendar offers standard daily, weekly and monthly views. Appointments can be entered by clicking on the hour or day. The monthly view is available in one window, but the entries are small.

AOL's daily calendar is less colorful, but is otherwise similar to MSN's. However, the weekly view is laid out vertically, and manages to show the entire week in one window. That leaves the type relatively small, a potential issue for those with vision problems.

The calendars and address books in MSN and AOL can be synced with PDAs and Microsoft Outlook. Both, along with Yahoo!, use Intellisync software, which must be downloaded. It is free.

If you're the forgetful type, you'll be glad to know that all of the calendars send e-mail reminders. In fact, Yahoo! sends two. In some cases, reminders also can be sent to cell phones and pagers.

Macintosh users will want to check out iCal (www.apple.com/ical), a free downloadable program that can publish your calendar to Apple's .Mac online service or another Web space if you set it up properly. It also works with Palm PDAs and many cell phones using the free iSync tool.

If you're among the many people who prefer to keep their life organized in Microsoft's popular Outlook personal information manager, you can post your calendar as a Web page. To set that up, from the Outlook menu, select Calendar, File and then, Save as Web page. Simply follow the instructions from there.