Q. What is a Calendar Download?
A. A Calendar Download allows you to easily download your Activities as Calendar items into you own program, such as Outlook. This allows your clubs Activities, or those ones you are interested in, to show in your Calendar with all your other items.
Q. Where can I find the Calendar Download for my Club?
A. If you look on your clubs Home Page you will see a little icon
on the left hand side of the page. This will download all the future Activities for your Club at once.Q. Where can I find the Calendar Download for each Activity?
A. If you look on each Activity Page you will see a little icon
on the left hand side of the page. This will download just this Activity.Q. Can I pick and choose which Activities I Download?
A. You can either go to the Club page and download them all or you can go to each Activity and Download that one. Activity Exchange does not offer the ability to pick and choose which ones you want. The software you use on your own computer can and might offer this.
Q. Are these downloads standard?
A. Yes, they comply with the relevant Internet Standard (RFC2445) and with normal practice for these downloads.
Q. Will Private information be downloaded?
A. To see Private information you must be logged onto Activity Exchange. If you log on and then click the Calendar icon you will get all the information about the Activity or Activities. If you tick the "Remember Me" box then you will always be logged on.
Q. Are Activity Invites downloaded?
A. Yes they are. If you don't want these showing your Club needs to decline the invitation. This can be done by going to your Clubs Home Page and clicking on the "Activity Invites" link. Then you can deselect those Activities you want to decline.
Q. How is Activity Duration set?
A. Activities are always set to last for 3 hours when downloaded by this method even thought this will not always be the case for some Activities.
Q. How do I use this with my software?
A. That depends on your software. Advice is given below for Outlook 2003 which is fairly common but there are other versions of Outlook and other programs. You will have to try it and see.
Q. How can I use this download feature with Outlook 2003?
A. For a single Activity just click on the icon and then when the pop-up box appears click on Open. This will open an Outlook Calendar item box with the details filled in. You can amend it if you want (you might want to alter the Reminder setting) and then click "Save and Close". If you do the same for the Club download, which contains all the Activities, then you will only be able to load the first one, the rest will be lost. The way to solve this is to save the file and then, in Outlook, go to File->Import and Export. Choose "Import an iCalendar or vCalendar file (.vcs)", click on Next and Browse to your saved file. Do not worry that your saved file has a .ics ending.
Q. I am using Outlook 2003 and the Clubs Activities are duplicated?
A. Outlook 2003 will import Calendar items even if they already exist. The way to fix this is to delete all the items from the previous download. They will all have the same "Created" date. To find all these switch your Calendar into the "Active Appointments" view. If it has not been added add the "Created" column by right clicking the titles bar and selecting "Field Chooser". Then pick the "Created" column. To delete all the Calendar items that were imported at one time, click the "Created" column to sort by the created date. This will group all the items that you imported at one time together and you can easily select all of them and delete them.
Q. Are there better ways of using this download?
A. There are various synchronisation programs available on the Internet which synchronise your Outlook or whatever you are using with a Calendar download such as that provided by Activity Exchange. Activity Exchange is unable to advise or recommend which would be best for your use.
Q. Are there other ways of getting my Clubs Activities?
A. Yes, you can use the RSS Feed which use an Internet standard format to provide Activities as a feed. You can find out more here RSS FAQ.
Q. Are there any other ways?
A. Activity Exchange also offers an XML Feed which contains all the information about your Activities. You can find out more here XML FAQ.