How to set up and use the Calendar in Windows 10

Microsoft’s Calendar application is intertwined with the new Mail program, so if you set up an account in one you’ll instantly have it added to the other. Calendar supports Live Tiles on the Start Menu to alert you to upcoming events, as well as Action Centre notifications, so it’s definitely worth adding all your calendar/email accounts to help you stay on top of your diary.

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The Calendar app should be in the ‘Life at a glance’ section of the Start Menu by default, and you can find it quickly by pressing the Windows key and typing Calendar.

Setup

The Microsoft account you used to set up Windows 10 will already be set up when you first open Calendar. If you set up Mail before you opened Calendar, any accounts you added there will also appear here, but if you jumped straight into the Calendar application and need to add another account, click the cog icon in the bottom-left corner to open the Settings pane on the right side of the screen. From here, click ‘Accounts’ and then ‘Add Account’.

See, how to use Mail in Windows 10

The pop-out menu that appears will let you add an Outlook.com, Live.com or Hotmail.com webmail address, or an Exchange, Office 365, Gmail or Apple iCloud account. If you have another kind of account, such as one from your ISP you access via POP3, you’ll need to click ‘Advanced set-up’. Once you’ve entered your details, the program will begin syncing your calendar and adding entries to the month view.

Calendar displays a week view by default, giving you a seven-day overview of your upcoming appointments. You can change this to a detailed Day view, a Work Week view which only shows Monday to Friday, or a Month overview for getting a general idea of exactly what you’ve got coming up over the next 30 days. All these views can be found at the top-right corner of the application. There’s also a Today button, which will jump back to today’s date after you’ve added a future event.

Choosing calendars

As with the Mail application, Calendar hides its menus until you click the three horizontal lines icon in the top-left corner. This reveals a small month view, which lets you quickly jump to a specific day without having to scroll through the main calendar view, and lets you toggle specific calendars on and off. By default our Outlook webmail account added UK holidays and the birthdays of all our contacts, but you can hide these by clicking the coloured box next to each calendar in the list. Right-clicking a calendar here will let you change the colour of that calendar’s events.

Adding an event

To add a new event, simply click anywhere on the calendar view. A pop-up will appear, letting you name the event, set start and end times (or set an all-day event), add a location and assign the event to a particular calendar. Clicking a calendar entry you’ve created will expand the event to fill the screen, letting you amend details, add a more thorough description, drag in photos and invite other people. Those invited to the event will appear to the right of the screen. It’s here you can set a reminder, from 15 minutes to one week before the start of the event.

You can also add calendar appointments using the Cortana Digital Assistant – for more information, see our Guide to Cortana.

As in the Mail application, Microsoft has simplified Calendar as much as possible, leaving just a few entries in the Settings panel. Clicking the cog at the bottom-left, then clicking Calendar Settings in the panel that opens on the right, lets you set the first day of the week, the number of days in your personal working week, your start and end of work hours, whether to number each week of the year and whether to use light or bright colours for each Calendar account. Oddly, the first day of the week dropdown menu always displays Sunday as the selected entry, even if you’ve chosen another day, but everything else works as expected.