How to Set an Alarm in iCal

How to Set an Alarm in iCal
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Do you ever get lost in the world of Myspace or Facebook only to find that an hour has gone by and you missed that deadline to e-mail your paper to your professor or go that meeting? Let your worries stray as iCal’s alarm feature will have you on time to every activity you deemed important.

Your very first step for setting up an iCal alarm is to select the date and time. Open iCal and when you double click on the day you wish to have the alarm set for you will be prompted to give the activity a title. Once the title has been chosen click again on the newly created activity. A window should pop up giving you several more options.

Move the mouse pointer down until it is over the Alarm option. Click on it, and a drop down menu should appear. There will be a variety of options to choose from such as Message, Message with Sound or Open file. Here’s what each one does.

Message - a message will show up when the alarm goes off taking priority over any other dialog box or program running.

Message With Sound - The same thing will happen that does with just a message only a sound will also play. You are able to choose from a list of sounds to your liking.

E-mail - An e-mail alert will be sent to your inbox. Be careful though, because if you don’t have an instant e-mail notification then you won’t really be alerted right away that you received an e-mail.

Open File - this allows you to open a song in iTunes or a movie or any files on your computer to let you know the set alarm time has arrived.

Run Script is for more advanced users, so for this basic guide we’ll stick with those four options.

Once the alarm is set it is time to choose if it will go off prior to the set time, after it, or right on that date. If the latter of the options is chosen then you will be able to choose exactly what time of day it will go off.

From there you just select Done and you’ll never be late again, at least if iCal has anything to do with it.

For frequent iCal users, this feature is vital for keeping on time and alerted of dates and activities. It’s a handy little device so make sure to take advantage of its abilities.

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