In the third and last part of our Windows Calendar series, we will show you how to subscribe to online calendars and publish your own calendars to remote locations such as a web host.

Subscribing to a calendar

First, click the Subscribe button from the Windows Calendar toolbar and the Subscribe to a Calendar wizard will open.

You will need to type the address of the calendar you want to subscribe to. This address can be a network location (e.g. "\\servername\folder\calendar.ics") or a web location. For example, you can subscribe to your Google Calendar or to any other public calendar. Also, here you can find a list of online calendars that are available and work with Windows Calendar.

For this tutorial we chose CalendarData.com. CalendarData.com is a free site that allows you to find feeds of calendar events like holidays, sport teams schedules, school schedules and so on. Just go to the Browse Calendars section of the site and select the calendar you want to subscribe to.

In the details page of the selected calendar you can find the Subscribe: Windows Vista Calendar link. Click on it and you will see that its address is loaded in the Subscribe to a Calendar wizard.

In case you are using Internet Explorer 7, you might receive a security warning like the one shown below. Make the appropriate security confirmations and then Windows Calendar will pop-up.

If you are using Firefox or Opera you won't receive such warnings.

In the Subscribe to a Calendar window click on Next.

In the next window type the calendar name, choose the update interval and select if you want to include reminders or tasks.

Now click on Finish and the new calendar will appear in the Calendars section.

Publishing Calendars

You can publish your calendar to almost any remote location. Before you publish it, you should make sure you have the appropriate permissions. Otherwise, the publishing process will fail.

To publish a calendar, first select it from the Calendars section. Go to the Share menu and click on Publish.

The Publish Calendar window will open. Type the name of the calendar and enter the location where you want to publish it. You can enter a web host you have access to or you can browse to a shared network location and publish it there. Further information about where to publish your calendars can be found on the Windows Vista: Calendar Publishing page.

Choose the calendar details you want to include and click on the Publish button. Wait for the calendar to be published and press the Finish button.

NOTE: Many readers have reported having problems when publishing their calendar to an online location. Each time they received an error message saying that 'the network path cannot be found'. We tried to find solutions to this problem and unfortunately we have encountered the same issues. Searching on the internet has not helped at all. If you have a solution or a set of guidelines people can use to publish their calendars online, please share it with us and we will publish it.

Related articles:
The complete guide to the Windows Calendar - Part 1
The complete guide to the Windows Calendar - Part 2
Windows Mail
Windows Contacts