I’ve been making use of Microsoft Works’ calendar for the past 9 months. If you want to use this as your calendar, you will find it very helpful. Before this, I was using calendars I made myself in excel. The features in Works calendar made life a lot easier. That being said, here are some tips to avoid making Works more work than its worth.

Back up your calendar
Exporting is nice, but it’s a headache to import it back in. I found that my recurring entries (birthdays) were no longer a series, but individual entries. It is a major pain going through every year when you want to erase some recurring event. Backing up the file called wkscal.wkd preserves everything exactly as it is.

Import accuracy
If you do export your calendar, you may find it tricky to select a date range. In my version (7.0), I could not export events beyond the year 2100. What you have to do to preserve your entries is click on the date in the export options. Change the year as desired. Then click on the drop-down arrow to bring up a mini-calendar. This will allow you to select a day of that year. Simply typing in the day may be rejected, and your exported calendar will not have your desired range - A majorly surprising disappointment when you import your calendar back in. Be sure to click the “all appointments” radio button.

Inaccurate entries
Now that you’ve imported your vcalendar, you will want to inspect that all your entries are intact. If they are not, your vcalendar file was not created correctly.

Clearing the calendar
In your Works suite came on a CD, pop it in. Delete the wkscal file on your harddrive, and replace it with the one from the CD. You will need to right-click the newly placed file and select properties. At the bottom, uncheck the “read-only” box. Now open your calendar and it should be empty.

Files to keep on hand
Once you’ve entered all major holidays, birthdays, and such, you will want to save this ‘starting point.’ Copy the wkscal file onto an external disc or device. In case something happens to your calendar or computer, you will have this file to get you started up again. Periodically, save the wkscal file again as you put in other events. This will give you more recent points to restore your calendar with.