TMO Quick Tip - iCal: Event Alarm Presets

by , 7:30 AM EDT, October 3rd, 2008

If you use iCal to keep your schedule under control, odds are you are familiar with its event alarms. Once you start making event alarms, Leopard's iCal remembers the settings you used, and will even let you reuse them will little more than a mouse click.

To reuse alarm settings that you have already applied to other events in iCal, do this:

• First make a new event.
• While that event is still selected, type Command-E to open the event's editor window.
• Click the alarm pop-up menu and look to the bottom of the list for your most recently used event alarms.
• Select the alarm you want to add to your event from the pop-up menu list.

iCal remembers all of the settings associated with each alarm preset. In my case, I regularly set audible alarms to go off 15 minutes before an event, and I tend to use the same handful of alert tones for all of my events. Since iCal remembers those for me, I don't have to first tell iCal I want to set an alarm with a message and sound, select the alert tone, and then set how far in advance it should go off every time I make a new event.

While iCal does include a preference for setting the default alarm for every event, I prefer using the preset alarm feature because I don't always want to attach an alarm to an event, and I typically don't want to use the exact same alarm settings for every event I create.

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Jeff Gamet is TMO's Morning Editor and Reviews Editor. He lectures, teaches and speaks on Mac OS X and design-related topics, and is the author of The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X from Peachpit Press.

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Jeff Gamet is TMO's Managing Editor and Reviews Editor. He lectures, teaches and speaks on Mac OS X and design-related topics, and is the author of The Designer's Guide to Mac OS X from Peachpit Press.