Notes

Notes are an integral part of calendars and daily lists and MPC gives you easy ways to enter, display, change and use notes as lists and as they appear on calendars.  If you are like most people you organize your work by the day and then assemble your tasks into weekly, monthly and sometimes yearly schedules.  Notes can be entered for the entire 24 hour period of a day in fifteen minute intervals.  Individual notes can be set as alarms.

Entering Notes

The first way to enter notes using MPC is on a daily schedule.  Click on the tool bar button that shows the Daily List icon or use the menu command to build the Daily List window.  This window has two parts; on the left side of the window is a scrolling list of notes that begins at 12:00 am and ends at 12:00 pm.  In addition there are four more notes that are labeled; "Note" and "Banner".  The "Note" is the one that will be displayed on the monthly calendars.  The "Banner" is the note that will be displayed as a banner across two or more days.

Above the list of notes is an edit field for entering notes.  Type in your note and then select the button to update the list. You can also hit the Return key to enter the note.  To the right is a button to use when entering a new note, changing an existing note or deleting a note.

The small calendar on the window allows you to click on the day you want to view the notes for or to move to the next or previous note.

When entering notes using the repeating note function or using the two note windows you are limited to notes that are 200 characters or less in length.  As a shortcut to enter a note for the calendar display, hold down the Control key and click on the day you want.  A dialog box will appear that allows you to enter a note up to 200 characters long.  Make sure you have sized the note field to accept the amount of text you wish to display.

Task Durations

As you will notice each not has a duration of at least fifteen minutes.  We all know tasks can and do have varying lengths of time so MPC allows you to enter a note and then by using the mouse, define the duration of the note.  If you click on the duration column below the selected note, MPC will increase the duration by fifteen minutes.  Each time you click just below the last duration mark, MPC will increase the duration of the note above by fifteen minutes.  To enter more than one 15 minute duration at a time, hold down the Command key and click on the last time you want to include.  To shorten a task, click on the last duration mark you want to keep and MPC will eliminate the remaining portion of the duration.  Just to the left of the duration column is the done column.  Notes can be marked as either done, not done or alarms.  Clicking on the row that includes the note will toggle the note from one to the other.  Holding down the Command key and performing the above operations toggles the alarm notation for the notes.  All notes except for banner notes can be entered in this window.  To enter banner notes you must click and drag on the monthly calendar to enter the note.

Printing Daily Notes

Now having a computer that can display the notes for you is nice, but most of us do not carry a computer with us and do not want to startup the computer each time we want to consult our schedule.  MPC will print your daily list of notes in a size that will fit many daily planner formats.   You can print from one or two days per page and can select to print the current day or select a range of days for the month.

Monthly Notes

The second way to modify notes is by using the "Notes" window.  This window displays the full list of notes for the month.  Using this window you can add notes, delete notes, modify the status, or change the existing note.

Weekly Notes

The weekly notes window allows you to view a weekly of notes at one time.  Clicking on the "Include Duration" button will toggle displaying the duration of each note for the day.  The window can be resized.  Notes cannot be entered on this view.

Repeating Notes

The final way to enter notes is the repeating note feature.  Open the "Repeating Notes" window and you will see groups of buttons that allow you to schedule how often the note will repeat.  Notes are scheduled on a daily, weekly and monthly basis for the current year.  The two scrolling lists allow you to determine the starting time of the note and the finish time.  MPC will cycle through your choices of how often to repeat the note and enter the note and the duration you have selected.  If you want to check to see if a current note exists before asking MPC to enter the notes, click on the "Check Conflicts" button.  If you do not use this feature, MPC will replace any notes it finds that conflicts with your new note.  If you had a note on a Wednesday from 12pm to 4pm and entered a repeating note from say 1pm to 2pm, the entire note would be erased and replaced with your new note.

During the update procedure, a dialog box will notify you of the progress MPC is making in adding the notes.  You could ask MPC to enter an twenty four hour note (assuming you had enough memory available!) on every day of the year if you wished, so it is nice to see the progress during what may be a lengthy process.

Notes are saved in a compressed format for quick saving and loading.  If you have a properly formatted list of notes they can be imported.  See the topic below or consult the Users Guide.