MacMost: Calendar

There doesn't appear to be a way to view your Mac Calendar events as a list, but it can be done if you know one trick. You can use the list to easily select items, and then copy and paste them in a variety of ways. You can also print or save a PDF list of events.

You can create daily reminders to do things like take pills using either the Reminders app or the Calendars app. Figure out which one is best for you.

A common problem is finding that you are suddeny missing contacts, notes, calendar events or email messages on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. It could just be that you are looking only at a specific account or subgroup of those items in that app. Here's how to switch back to viewing all entries.

You can create a calendar like a work, organization or team schedule on your Mac, and then publish it using iCloud so others can view it. Calendar apps on other platforms can subscribe to the calendar although some may not show updates in a timely manner.

The Calendar app lets you use as many calendars as you like, dividing up your events and appointments into groups that make sense to you. With multiple calendars, you can turn them on or off to more easily see what you have coming up and share only the events that you need to share.

The Mac Calendar app allows you to set custom reminders that will send you an email message, open a file or launch an application. You can also add more than one alert so you can get both a notification and use a custom alert for the same event.

You can schedule notifications of important items at specific times using eithe the Calendar app or the Reminders app on your Mac, iPhone and iPad. So why are there two apps that seem to do the same thing? These apps do overlap somewhat, but they also have their own unique functionality. When you need to schedule something, however, it can be hard to decide which app to use. But there are good reasons to choose one over the other in most situations.

Today is Holi, the Hindu Spring festival. It is one of many cultural and religious holidays included on Apple's default US Holidays calendar. Not everyone in the US celebrates all of the days on the US Calendar. Looking up the holidays you are unfamiliar with is an opportunity to learn about other holidays and cultures.

In the Mac Calendar app, you can view a selection of local holidays using switch in Calendar Preferences. You can see holidays in other countries by temporarily switching your Mac's region and then toggling this preference. You can also subscribe to any publicly-available calendar you wish from the Internet. You can make your own calendars and share those as well.

If you travel between time zones and want to make sure your calendar event times reflect exactly the time you want them to, then turn on Time Zone Support in Calendar preferences. This will insure that times don't shift as you move around. Plus, you can set times with specific time zones and see those time zones reflected in the start and end times for the events.

Creating new events in the Mac Calendar app is relatively simple, but there are many options. You can create a new even by clicking in the calendar, or using the Create Quick Event feature. It is easy to modify an event while creating it or later on.

The Calendar app makes it useful to print out blank monthly calendar pages for use at work or home. You can also include events or birthdays on the printed page. This can be useful for planning or just having a calendar in a room away from your Mac.

Over the last few weeks many people have been reporting unwanted Calendar invites, usually looking like junk email with a sales pitch and links. It is difficult to get rid of these invites without notifying the sender that you either declined or accepted it. But there is a method to quietly delete the invite. A better solution is to switch to email notifications of Calendar invites until Apple fixes the problem.

You can set events to repeat weekly, monthly or annually in Mac Calendar. You can highly customize these settings to do things like having an event repeat the second Tuesday of every month, or every Monday and Thursday. See all of the options available.

You can create recurring calendar events on your Mac and the latest version of iOS. For instance, you can create an event that will automatically recur on the second Tuesday of every month.

You can add Automator actions and even AppleScripts as alarms in the Calendar app on your Mac. It may look like this is no longer possible with Yosemite, but you can do it as long as you use the special Calendar Alarm document type in Automator, or if you simply use an On My Mac calendar instead of an iCloud one.

With iCloud, you can create shared family calendars that appear on your Mac and iOS devices. You can add anyone with an iCloud account to the calendar and they can view, edit and add events. This makes it easy for a family to stay organized. You get notifications when someone changes the calendar. You can create many of these calendars for different subjects or different groups of people to share. If someone does not have a Mac or iOS device, it may be easier to use a Google calendar instead, which can still be accessed in the same Calendar apps on Apple devices.

When setting up and event in Calendar, you would normally assign a time. But what if you travel between time zones? You'll need to enable Calendar's time zone support feature. Then you need to consider questions like, do you set the event for the current time zone, or the one where you will be when the event takes place?

You can use a Google Calendar on Mac or your iOS device just as easily as you can use an iCloud calendar. There is no need to 'sync' between them as using one or the other is all that is needed. Google Calendars can be shared between your Mac, iOS, Android and Windows devices.

The OS X Finder offers simple options to compress video and audio files. You can use this to quickly re-compress these files before archiving them or sending them to others. These simple functions only work with some file types and offer limited options.