Appointment Calendar

Organize your personal Schedule

by Alfred Filskov, III

A cleanly programmed, useful personal appointment calendar. No more frantically trying to keep track of your schedule on scraps of paper, when your Atari takes over as social secretary. This BASIC program works on all 8-bit Atari computers with 32K memory, disk only.

Keeping track of appointments is not a new job for computers. But I've seen other calendar-type programs that weren't as practical as this one. For instance, they wouldn't let you write in the appointments and view the calendar on the screen at the same time. Appointment Calendar also lets you print the entire month, or only individual appointments, on any Epson, Gemini, or compatible printer.

If you've ever tried to use a typewriter to squeeze event listings on a calendar, you'll appreciate how much neater and easier this program is. Soon you'll be cranking out well-organized calendars – great for offices or clubs to use in newsletters or flyers to announce upcoming events.

To put this program to serious use, you might want to keep a separate disk solely for appointments. A disk with DOS and the Appointment Calendar program on it still has enough room left for 17 months.

My Appointment Calendar begins every week on Monday, the way most commercial appointment diaries do.

MAKING A DATE

Type in Listng 1, CALENDAR.BAS, check it with TYPO II and SAVE a copy before you RUN it. Appointment Calendar is simple to use. When you RUN the program you'll find the Main Menu on a red screen. Press the [1] on your keyboard to create a month. Then type in the number of the month (April is 4, etc.) and press [RETURN]. Now type in the last two digits of the year (86 for 1986, etc.) and press [RETURN].

A calendar for that month, and four windows, will pop up on a green screen. To write an appointment on the calendar; choose option 2, Edit Date, in the menu at the upper right corner of the screen. Now follow the instructions that will appear in the MESSAGE window at the lower right corner.

Type in the day and press [RETURN]. The cursor will move down to the appointment window. Write your appointment message here, using a [RETURN] at the end of each line. Backspace to [DELETE] any mistakes. The cursor works in this window, but it's very slow. Press [ESC] to load your message in the calendar, where it will be indicated onscreen by a display of the date in inverse type.

To print that day's appointments only, press [3]. This will work with any printer. To print the calendar for the whole month, just press [4]. Unfortunately, only condensed print will fit in the calendar spaces, so this option will only work on printers with Epson, Gemini, or compatible print modes. You will be given the option of saving the calendar to disk before you can type [5] to return to the Main Menu.

Once you're back to the main menu, type [3] to see your calendars listed in the disk directory, or [2] to delete any month you no longer need. When you're done, just press [4] to end the program.

Alfred Filskov, III is an Industrial Engineering major at North Camlina State University.

Listing 1: CALENDAR.BAS Download