Keep your calendar out of the cloud with Efficient Calendar

When it comes to desktop calendar software on the PC, there is little argument that the big dog in the park is Microsoft Outlook. However, while Outlook comes with a hefty feature set, it also comes with a hefty price tag—more than most people would want to pay to schedule their time. Efficient Calendar takes the core calendar functions of Outlook into a standalone desktop application at a small fraction of the price.

The Calendar view shows your upcoming events at a glance.

Calendar events are very easy to create. You can specify the start and end times, control recurrence, assign a color-coded label, and attach or link documents. Comments can be entered in a full rich-text editor, and the labels can be easily customized if the provided default labels are not to your liking.

Similarly, the Tasks function is very robust—perhaps overkill for people just looking for a basic to-do checklist. You can set start and due dates, assign a status (such as "not started" or "on hold"), and specify how complete you feel the task is as a percentage. Tasks also have labels, attachments, recurrence settings, and rich-text comments like calendar events do.

The software makes automatic local backups of your calendar file, and the application moves your deleted events and tasks into a Recycle Bin folder, so you can recover something you accidentally deleted very easily.

The Tasks view shows the status of your currently active tasks.

The Achilles heel of Efficient Calendar comes down to data portability. As an Outlook substitute, Efficient Calendar can import and export Outlook-compatible CSV files. However, it does not import or export the much more common iCalendar format (*.ics) used by Google, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Apple, and a litany of others. It does not sync with any cloud calendar providers, which is great if you are anti-cloud but not so great if you need your calendar on your Android, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Efficient Calendar does, however, have a server solution that lets you share a calendar with mutliple users. The server itself is free, while the Network edition costs more to license than the Personal edition does.

If a Task or Calendar event is deleted, it gets moved to the Recycle Bin.

For the people who don't need (or don't want) their calendar on their mobile devices or on the Internet, Efficient Calendar is a great buy. For everyone else, the 30-day trial is fully functional and should give you an idea if the limitations are something you can live with or not.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Nathanael is a freelance writer who lives with his family in Caldwell, Idaho. Besides writing about software, he also specializes in eBook conversions.
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Possibly The World's Best Desktop Calendar: VueMinder Pro

In these days of cloud-based services like Google Calendar and Zoho, having a dedicated desktop calendar application almost seems like an anachronism (even Microsoft Outlook does email in addition to calendar duties). But VueMinder Pro ($50, 60-day free trial) is anything but anachronistic. This thoroughly modern calendar application synchronizes with online calendars and offers a richer interface than its Web-based competitors.

VueMinder Calendar Pro supports multiple calendars and features a very customizable interface.In addition to the main application, VueMinder Pro also has a desktop calendar that overlays your desktop wallpaper, and is fully functional: You can use it to schedule new events, edit existing ones, or just get an overview of your schedule at a glance. You can also move and resize the calendar, control its opacity to let your wallpaper show through, and remove its window borders so it really blends into the desktop.

VueMinder's tooltips are some of the most useful I've ever seen. Most applications use tooltips to explain the interface; VueMinder uses them as part of the application, offering a condensed view of your schedule. Want to see what today holds? Hover over VueMinder's system tray icon (conveniently showing today's date), and the tooltip shows a brief view of your agenda. The same goes when you reschedule an event: Open the date dropdown box, and hover over the date to which you want to move the event. VueMinder will pop up a tooltip showing what's already been scheduled for that day, so you can instantly tell if that's a good time for that event.

Unlike Google Calendar, VueMinder Pro does not automatically dim past and repetitive events. It does something better: It dims only events you mark as done. This subtle difference smoothly blends calendar with to-do list, and is pretty addictive once you get used to it. If you're looking for more powerful to-do functionality, VueMinder features a built-in Task List with multiple task statuses, hierarchical tasks, and Google Tasks synchronization.

VueMinder Pro offers four traditional calendar views (Day, Week, Month, Year), but you can also view your events as a list, much like the Agenda view on Google Calendar. Here, again, VueMinder Pro offers more than Google Calendar: You can select what columns to display, define a date range for the list, and more. The agenda view is docked under the traditional calendar, so you can see both views at once. Unfortunately, clicking an event on the agenda view doesn't always activate it in the calendar view.

You can work with multiple calendars, and even divide your calendars into groups so you can instantly filter the display to show only events from a particular calendar or group of related calendars. You can also add Google calendars, but I had a some trouble trying to synchronize my five overloaded Google calendars with VueMinder Pro. Most events would synchronize, but sometimes I would delete an event on VueMinder Pro and it would still appear on Google Calendar, even after synchronization. Developer VueSoft LLC said the problem was due to recent changes in Google's API and released a version that resolved most of the problems, but not all of them. As of this writing, VueMinder Pro still has some trouble with synchronizing repetitive Google Calendar events and with reassigning events to different calendars, but VueSoft is working to resolve this.

These Google Calendar issues are the only thing keeping me from using VueMinder as my desktop calendar of choice, after previously being sold on using Google Calendar exclusively. VueMinder Pro is an excellent calendar application, even for demanding users.

--Erez Zukerman

Take control of your schedule and get reminded wherever and however you want. Instantly access your appointments, tasks, and notes with a simple glance at a transparent calendar that sits right on your Windows desktop. Share calendars and reminders in your home, office, or online. Automatically synchronize with Google Calendar and Outlook. Print calendars using a wide variety of layouts and styles. You can do all these things and much more with VueMinder.

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