The calendar opens when you click the date and time in the footer. It shows a month at a time, with a list of the day you've chosen beside it, and it's for your own appointments: a calendar is a folder, each event is a small file in it, and you make and change them right there. It does not yet repeat events, remind you of them, or read anyone else's calendar. This page says how to do what it does, and what it doesn't.

Opening the Calendar

Click the clock at the foot of the window, on the right. The calendar opens in the View of whichever desktop is showing, on the current month and today. It isn't a file, so it isn't in the Back trail and isn't remembered with the desktop: close it and click the clock again, and you're back on this month. Its title says the month you're looking at.

The Month

The grid is always six rows of seven days, even for a month that needs five, so stepping from month to month never makes the cells jump. The week starts on the day your Windows language settings say. Days from the neighboring months are gray, and today's number sits in a colored circle (the day you've chosen is named in the heading of the list beside the grid). An event that has a time is a dot in the color of its calendar, then its time and title; an all-day event, or one that lasts several days, is a bar of that color with its title, cut at the end of a week and carried on in the next row. When a day has more than the cell can show, its last line says N more; click the day to see them all in the list. Point at a chip for its details.

Choosing a day outside the month on show, with the arrow keys or by clicking one of the gray days, turns to its month.

The Day

Beside the grid is the day you chose: its heading (Friday, October 30), then its events, all-day ones first and the rest by time. Click one and the box below it tells its title, its date and time, which calendar it's in, its place and its notes. That's also the panel where New Event..., Edit... and Delete live.

Calendars

On the left is the list of calendars, each with a check box and a swatch of its color. Untick one and its events leave the grid and the list, which is how you look at only work, or only family; Desktop Minder remembers which are ticked. Your calendars are listed first.

• Make one: the Sources button on the right of the bar, then New Calendar. It's named Calendar and its name is already open for typing. With no calendars at all the calendar says No calendars yet. with a New Calendar button, and New Event... makes the first one for you.
• Rename: right-click it, then Rename.
• Delete: right-click it, then Delete Calendar.... It asks, and the calendar and all its events go to the Recycle Bin.

Each new calendar takes the next color from a set of eight, so they're told apart without any work from you. There's no way to choose a color yet.

Events

Making an Event

Choose the day, then New Event.... A box asks for:

• Title. It may be left empty.
• Calendar, among your own.
• All day. Tick it and the times disappear.
• Starts and Ends, a date and a time each. A new event starts at nine that morning and lasts an hour. For an all-day event the Ends date is the last day it covers, because that's how people say it: October 8 to October 10.
• Place and Notes, both plain text.

An event that ends before it starts is refused, in red, in the box.

Changing or Deleting an Event

Select it in the day's list and press Edit..., which shows the same box; you can move it to another of your calendars there. Delete asks first, with No as the answer your Enter key gives, and sends the event's file to the Recycle Bin. Both buttons are gray for an event you can't change, which is any event in a calendar that comes from somewhere else. Today every calendar is your own.

A Calendar Is a Folder

Calendars are kept in the Calendars folder of your PIM folder, beside Mail and Contacts, so they travel with your OneDrive. Each calendar is a folder there, holding a small settings file with its name, color and whether it's shown, and one .ics file for each event, the iCalendar format nearly every calendar program can read. One file for each event is deliberate: two computers rarely touch the same file, and if they do, OneDrive keeps both. Desktop Minder knows an event by the identity inside its file, shows the newer of two copies, and when you delete the event removes every file that holds it, so a conflict copy can never bring it back.

Nothing is made until you make a calendar: a person who never opens it leaves no folder behind. Without OneDrive the same folders are kept on the one computer, and nothing travels.

Times are written as universal time, so an event made on a computer in one time zone is at the right hour on a computer in another. An all-day event is written as a date and never goes through a time zone, so it can't slip to the wrong day.

Sources

The Sources button holds New Calendar, then one submenu for each source installed, then Google Calendar on the Web, which opens Google's own calendar as a page in the View so you can look at it, with the usual Back. A source is a small piece of the program that fetches calendars from somewhere else into a folder of their own here, no more than once an hour while the calendar is open, and the button on the bar with the circle of arrows, Check for changes now, asks them to do it at once. Those calendars are read-only copies, since the next fetch would overwrite an edit, and their events can open their page on the web or join a meeting from the buttons under the day's list.

The machinery for sources is built and tested, but no source is installed in the program today, so the submenu list is empty and the Check button has nothing to ask. Your calendars are your own and live here.

Not Yet

• Google Calendar. Reading your Google calendars into the calendar is designed, but not built. Until then, Google Calendar on the Web shows you Google's page.
• Repeating events. An event happens once. A calendar file that comes from elsewhere and says it repeats is read, but its repeat rule is ignored, so it appears only on its first day. For a birthday every year, make an event each year.
• Reminders. Nothing alarms or tells you when an event is near.
• Day, week and agenda views. There is the month, and the list of one day.
• Choosing a calendar's color, and moving an event by dragging it to another day.
• Invitations and replies, and a place for several people's calendars to be shared.
• Searching events.