I've been working with the Notes 6 calendar a lot lately and thought I would share six quick tips for customizing the calendar settings. Note that some of these may also work in R5, but I didn't test them using that version. None of these tips are earth-shattering, but often it's the simple things we overlook when using the Notes client.

1) Double-click in a time slot to create an Appointment. You can also change this default and make a double-click create a Meeting, All Day Event, Anniversary or Reminder (Tools-->Preferences-->Basics Tab).

2) Change the default "Duration for a new Appointment or Meeting" to a value that works best for you. This can help minimize how often you have to adjust the length of a new Appointment or a Meeting entry that you've created (Tools-->Preferences-->Basics Tab).

3) Adjust the display of your calendar to show the hours you usually work. For instance, you can specify that your day begins at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 5:00 p.m. and how long each time slot should last. I changed the time slot setting to 15 minutes on my calendar, which allows me to more easily view shorter calendar entries that got smushed together before. The smaller time slot setting also allows me to more easily and accurately drag-and-drop calendar entries to a different time slot (Tools-->Preferences-->Display Tab).

4) To get a quick overview of the calendar entries for a particular day, week, or month, click on "Formatting" at the top-right of the action bar and choose Summarize.

5) To print out a summary of all of your calendar entries for a specified period, go to File-->Print and in the "What to Print" section choose "Calendar List" from the drop-down box. Choose a range of dates to print entries from (don't worry, dates with no entries will not be printed) and click OK.

6) To make the calendar information on a printed page larger, try the following: First, change the top and bottom margins on the Page Setup tab of the Print Calendar dialog to .5 or something similar. Second, on the Calendar Style tab of the Print Calendar dialog de-select the "Print three month banner" option.

Tweaking Notes calendar settings just a little bit can go a long way towards making it easier and more enjoyable to use. If you have any other cool Notes calendar tips I'd love to hear them. You can reach me at dvelasco@dominopower.com.

Dan Velasco is a Senior Technical Editor for WebSpherePower Magazine and DominoPower Magazine. He's a Sun Certified Java Programmer, Sun Certified Web Component Developer and an IBM Certified Solution Developer for WebSphere Studio V5.0. He's also a Principal CLP Application Developer (R4, R5 and ND6) as well as a CLP System Administrator (R4 and R5). You can reach him via email at dvelasco@webspherepower.com or on the Web at http://DanVelasco.com.