One of the most popular changes to Outlook 2003's calendar is the ability to display multiple calendars side-by-side, as seen in Figure A.

FIGURE A

Outlook 2003 lets you show many different calendars side-by-side. Click picture for a larger image.

The calendars are color-coded, making it easy to identify each calendar. You can show up to 13 calendars side-by-side, however it's difficult to use that many at once without a high resolution monitor.

By default, all calendars in the personal folders or mailboxes in your profile are added to My Calendars. Right click on any calendar entry you don't want listed and choose Remove from my Calendars. Add calendars back by switching to the Folder List view and right clicking on the calendar then choosing Add to My Calendars. Once you add Public Folder calendars to Public Folder Favorites you can add them to My Calendars.

Every Outlook user has an Open a Shared Calendar link, but it is only for use by Exchange server users, since it's used to open calendars owned by other users the organization. Although Share my Calendar is also only for Exchange organizations, anyone using SharePoint Server or Windows SharePoint Services can add a shared calendar from the portal site. SharePoint calendars only sync to Outlook -- you can't add items to the calendar in Outlook and sync them back to the SharePoint site. All shared calendars are added to the Other Calendar section.

As you can see in the figure above, the new window layout has navigation calendars in the upper left corner of the Navigation pane. As with other versions of Outlook, moving the vertical divider separating the navigation calendars from the main calendar adds additional thumbnail calendars to the display. While you can't adjust the divider separating My Calendars from the thumbnails up or down, as you can with the TaskPad, you can control the number of rows of navigation calendars by changing the size of the Outlook window.

If you prefer using the TaskPad, show it using View, TaskPad. Outlook supports thumbnail calendars only on one side of the calendar and moving the top edge of the TaskPad to the top of the window moves the navigation calendars back to the left side.

Diane Poremsky is the president of CDOLive LLC and a Microsoft Outlook MVP. She's author of Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours (Sam's, 2003) and coauthor of OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide). For questions or suggestions for future columns, write her at outlook@cdolive.com.