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Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 Microsoft Outlook® 2002

Both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2002 support vCalendar, a powerful approach to electronic Personal Data Interchange (PDI). PDI occurs every time individuals communicate in a business or personal context. These interchanges frequently include the exchange of information, such as business cards, telephone numbers, addresses, dates and times of appointments, and such. The vCard and vCalendar features in Outlook facilitate PDI electronically. This article discusses how to:

• Create a vCalendar file.
• Distribute a vCalendar file.
• Automatically process a vCalendar file.
• Manually process a vCalendar file as a text file.

vCalendar files are used to exchange information about appointments and schedules with others who are not in your workgroup or organization. You can also use them to schedule appointments with those who use scheduling software that is incompatible with yours.

Create a vCalendar file

To create a vCalendar file, do the following:

1. In a Calendar folder, click an appointment for which you want a vCalendar file.
2. On the File menu, click Save As.
3. In the Save as type box, select vCalendar Format (*.vcs).
4. In the Save in box, select the folder where you want to save the vCalendar file, and then click Save.

Distribute a vCalendar file

You can distribute a vCalendar file like other computer files. To send it as an e-mail attachment, do the following:

1. Open a new e-mail message, and then address it to the recipient.
2. On the Insert menu, click File.
3. Select a vCalendar (.vcs) file, and then click OK.

Automatically process a vCalendar file

With Outlook, you can automatically convert a vCalendar file that you receive from an external source into an Outlook appointment entry. If the vCalendar file arrives as an e-mail attachment, you can double-click the vCalendar file and then click Save and Close to add the appointment to your default Calendar folder.

If you receive the vCalendar in the form of a file, perhaps on a disk, you can import it into your default Calendar folder by using the Outlook Import and Export Wizard. To do this:

1. On the File menu, click Import and Export.
2. Under Choose an action to perform, select Import an iCalendar or vCalendar file (*.vcs), and then click Next.
3. Click the vCalendar file that you want, and then click Open.

Manually process a vCalendar file as a text file

A vCalendar file is just a text file. If you do not have an automated facility to process vCalendar files, you can open them with a text editor and use the information. The content of a vCalendar file varies with the information that is inserted by the file creator, but a typical file created from an Outlook appointment looks like the following example in a text editor:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR

PRODID:-//Microsoft Corporation//Outlook MIMEDIR//EN

VERSION:1.0

BEGIN:VEVENT

DTSTART:20040114T210000Z

DTEND:20040114T230000Z

LOCATION:My office

CATEGORIES:Business

DESCRIPTION;ENCODING=QUOTED-PRINTABLE:This is a note associated with the
meeting=0D=0A

SUMMARY:Meeting to discuss salaries

PRIORITY:3

END:VEVENT

END:VCALENDAR

 Note   The DTSTART and DTEND entries are a combination of the date and time in the format YYYYMMDDThhmmssZ, where YYYY=year, MM=month, DD=day of the month, T=start time character, hh=hour, mm=minutes, ss=seconds, and Z=end character. This string expresses the time as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC or Greenwich Mean Time) on a 24-hour clock, so it must be adjusted to your time zone.
For example, if you are in the Central Time zone in the United States, your time is six hours behind UTC. So you subtract six hours from the start and end times to derive the correct time range for the appointment. In the previous appointment example, the start time would be 210000-060000 or 150000 on the 24-hour clock. If you convert the time to A.M. or P.M., the start time is 150000-120000 or 3:00 P.M.