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Overview

The application's calendar allows you to enter, view and print your appointments and daily notes, and provides a pop-up alarm to remind you of important appointments.  The calendar's interface and display are mouse driven and easy to use.  You can tell at a glance, what dates in any month have appointments filed (these date numerals appear in red), or daily notes filed (these date numerals are underlined.)  

Both appointments and daily notes can be viewed and printed singly, or in groups by date, week, month, or for an arbitrary date range.  (See Appointment Reports.)

Also, the connection that the application maintains between the appointment calendar and its Trips Cabinet and Clients and Locations Cabinet, provides a few extra dividends: 

•  Your appointment records, when entered in the appointment calendar, will also be recorded in the visitation histories maintained by the Clients and Locations Cabinet.  Later, you can go to the client's master record in the Clients and Locations Cabinet, and view this or any other appointment, or create a client appointment report that spans one or more appointments, in this client's overall visitation history.  
• When entering a new appointment into the calendar, you can actively use the clients and places already on file in the Clients and Locations Cabinet, to reduce typing and speed up your data entry.  Just type a few characters of a person or location name, in the data fields of the new appointment template.  Then click one of the drop-down arrows, to view any matching records already in your database.  If you see a match, simply click on it and all relevant fields (name, address, phone, company affiliation, title, etc.) of the new appointment template will be instantly filled-in for you.  This can save you an enormous amount of repetitive typing and greatly streamline the entry of new appointments.  All you then need to do is fill in the date and time, and any other notes you care to make, and click "Save."
• From any appointment record, you can easily create a billable trip record, and save the link between the two.  Later, when you view the original appointment record, you can see the linked trip, and if you view the trip, you can see the linked appointment.  (Note:  The distinction here is that an "appointment" need not be, or involve, a trip. (i) An appointment might be only a date and time on your calendar, to schedule a phone call. (ii) An appointment record can be marked as 'kept' or 'not kept,' but an unkept trip record, makes less sense.  Indeed, (iii) an "appointment" need not involve travel at all.  To provide maximum flexibility, the application therefore treats appointments and trips as separate events, with substantially different functionality available for each.)

Appointments

As mentioned earlier, there is more than one way to enter, retrieve, and create appointment reports, in Mile Manager:

• By date, from the Appointment Calendar.  Open the Calendar, and position to a month or date of interest.  (There are several convenient ways to position to a target date, in the Calendar.)  Then just point to a date square and click, and select one of the options from the date square's own pop-up menu.  Options include (i) Enter New Appointment and (ii) View Appointments, for the date you just clicked on.  You will find this method of entering and manipulating appointments through the calendar to be very streamlined.
• By client or party, from the Clients and Locations  cabinet.  In this method, you first go to the Clients and Locations Cabinet and call up your desired client or place, using any of that cabinet's quick lists or custom search methods.  Then, simply double-click on the client or place, and select your option from the pop-up menu, which includes options to (i) Enter a New Appointment, (ii) View Latest Appointment, or (iii) View Appointments for Date Range.

'Alarmable' Property

Each appointment also has an Alarmable property, which you can set or clear on individual appointment records.  This allows you to enable the appointment alarm and to earmark certain appointments to trigger this alarm, but not others.  This can be a useful property, for users who have a number of appointments on file for various times throughout the day, and wish to use the alarm, yet only want a few of their appointments to trigger that alarm.

Daily Notes

These are handy for keeping any kind of personal reminder notes you care to make.  Simply point to a date square with the mouse and click.  Then select 'Daily Notes' from that date square's pop-up menu, and you can read or edit your daily notes.

You can also print your daily notes by day, week, month, or for any custom date range, from the Calendar's notes printing menu.

Pop-up Alarm

The alarm has an adjustable advance warning interval.  Simply set how far in advance (in minutes) of an appointment's Time field you wish to be notified, and enable the alarm.  Once you have turned on the alarm, you will be notified with a pop-up window, when any appointment's time moves into your advance warning window.  

From the alarm's pop-up reminder window, you can do any of several things, including access the appointment itself, access the phone dialer to dial a number in the triggering appointment, or simply turn off the alarm for that appointment.

Each appointment also has an individual Alarmable property, which allows you to be more selective in your use of the alarm.  (See Alarmable Property above, for more.)

Phone Dialer

The application also contains a phone dialer, that works through any standard modem that is connected to your computer.  You can dial a number directly from any appointment record you you are viewing on screen (this can be useful  in conjunction with the pop-up alarm, to schedule phone numbers.)  

You can also dial a client or location number, from the master record for that client or place, from within the Clients and Locations cabinet.  This allows you to use the Clients and Locations Cabinet's search methods, to find a client or place record of interest, and then dial that entity directly from the Clients and Locations Cabinet.

Daily Reminder List

Each time you launch the application from a dead start, the application can remind you with an abbreviated pop-up list of Today's Appointments (if any), if you enable the 'Startup Warnings' feature.  This feature is distinct from the appointment alarm.  You can enable or disable the Startup Warnings feature, and the alarm independently.

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