The humble calendar has been with us for centuries, keeping us up to date on where we are in the month and even in this electronic age it still has a place in our hearts. Young schoolchildren paint pictures to which small calendars are stapled, and they take them home to proud parents. The bedrooms of teenagers are adorned with calendars featuring pop stars or football teams. A grandmother delights in opening a Christmas present that is a calendar for the coming year with cute photos of kittens on it, and in recent years we have seen a penchant for organisations to make their own calendars featuring volunteers in states of tasteful undress that raise funds for worthy causes.

But while the good old hard copy calendar will always be with us, the relatively new e-calendar of Microsoft Outlook can do an awful lot more than inform us when the next Bank Holiday is due.

Anyone who has any kind of schedule should make full use of the calendar in Outlook. It is as close to having a personal assistant as is possible, performing such tasks as reminding you of appointments, inviting attendees to meetings, notifying those attendees of any updates regarding those meetings, and a whole lot more. Here are some basic guidelines on its use.

If a meeting you have logged in your calendar is cancelled, do not simply delete the mail after you have read it. You need to make sure that the appointment is removed from the calendar as well; otherwise you will be considered unavailable for that period. To do this, open the email containing the cancellation in your inbox and click on Remove from Calendar. You are now a free man.

If you were sending out invitations to a party you were throwing, you wouldn't send one to yourself, would you? Of course not, so keep this simple rule in mind when sending out meeting invitations. If you include yourself in the distribution list for the meeting invitation, and you accept it, then you become just another attendee on the list and you cannot change details of the meeting, or cancel it. To do this would require the sending of a new mail.

If you do have to cancel a meeting, it is courteous to let others know that it will not be taking place. This sounds like rather obvious common sense but when invitations have been sent out using Outlook, in order to let the attendees know that the meeting has been cancelled, you should delete it from their calendars as well so they are not marked as Busy for the period. To do this, choose Send Cancellation and Delete Meeting when sending your cancellation notice. This will ensure that you don't have a gathering of disgruntled colleagues turning up for a non-existent meeting while you are quite happily teeing off from the ninth.

You have a meeting scheduled for 2.00pm today but you have to put this back an hour because you have a more urgent, hastily arranged meeting with your manager, where you are to discuss rumours that you were seen on a golf course yesterday. To let the attendees know about this update, tell them using the Send Update to All Attendees option, and go and face the music.

You weren't expecting that. While you were happily playing golf yesterday a local TV news team was interviewing a retired footballer about a forthcoming charity golf event and there you were, large as life, in the background. You are now on two weeks' gardening leave while the matter is investigated, and you turn on the Out of Office Assistant to let people know you are not at work. To do this, go to Tools and select Out of Office Assistant. In the dialog box check the "I am Currently out of the Office" box. In the AutoReply Only Once to Each Sender with the Following Text box, type the message that you want to send for the duration of your suspension.

These are just some of the ways that the calendar in Outlook can make your life a whole lot easier and they demonstrate that it is so much more than an email application. Mastering all the elements of Outlook would place this extremely powerful personal information management systems literally at your fingertips.