Orage can handle three types of appointments:

The title of the appointment. It appears in the event list and also in the alarm window and is listed at the header of this window. It should be a rather short summary of the appointment.

This field should describe where the event happens. It can be for example Home or Office or Paris depending on what kind of appointment you have. It is also possible to leave it empty. orage is not using it in any special way, nor is it visible anywhere else than here. Journals do not have location.

Selecting this checkbox causes so called whole day appointment to be defined. These do not have start nor end time defined, but it is possible that the event lasts several days. Start time is assumed to be the beginning of the day at 00:00 and end date at the last day at 24:00.

Defines the start time of the appointment. First, press the date button and choose the date from the calendar. After that you set the hour and minute using either your mouse wheel or clicking the small arrows. It is also possible to type the numbers directly to the fields. Hours go from 0 to 23 (24 is not allowed value).

The last button is timezone. Default value for new appointments is your current timezone, which you have set in the preferences. It is recommended to use real timezones instead of floating. You should not mix floating with real timezones although it is possible. Floating means that time is not bound to any timezone, but varies according to current settings. Modifying either the default timezone or start timezone may cause floating values to change.

Similar to Start, but defines naturally the ending time. Note that start and end timezones may be different (for example when you schedule a meeting in abroad you can set the starting time in your local timezone and the rest of the timings in the destination timezone). Event list window always shows times in your local time. Only events have end time.

Similar to End, but defines the time where the todo should be completed. Only todos have due time.

Often it is easier to set the appointment duration instead of ending (or due) time. You can do that by marking the first box here. It is not possible to have both end/due time and duration at the same time, so end/due time setting will be unavailable after you select duration. Maximum duration is 1000 days, which is almost three years. Note that although the minute selection jumps 5 minutes at a time, you can manually enter any number.

What kind of reservation is this. There are two possiblities: Free means that the action is not reserving the time and it is possible to schedule more appointments at the same time and respectively Busy means that nothing else can not be done at this time. Note that current version of orage does not enforce these menings and the flag is only as a comment (in the future this may be checked).

By selecting the Done box you mark this todo as done. The completed time can then be set. Format is similar to other times (like Start). Only todos have completed time.

Free format text, which you can use to categorize your appointment. It is also possible to create a list of categories and associate those to colours. You can then pick one of those and get your appointment to be shown with that colour in the event list window.

Priority of the appointment. orage is not using this, so treat it just like a comment.

Free format text, where you can and should explain more the appointment. It is shown in the alarm window. Scrollbars appear when needed.

Define how much earlier or later the alarm happens. If all numbers are zero, no alarm is raised for this appointment. The last field defines what these alarm offset numbers mean. You can define alarm to happen based on start or end time of the appointment and also if it happens after or before the time. Default is to alarm before the start time of the appointment. But specially for todos it is often more usefull to raise alarm before the due (=end) time.

When orage is not running (for example if your computer is shutdown) alarms can't happen. If you want to get reminders after orage starts again, you need to set the alarm as persistent. By default alarms are just lost.

Define the sound file to be played when the alarm fires. Leaving this empty disables sound alarm. Remember to define the actual play command in the preferences dialog. You should also test that your system can play the filetype you choose there. Simply start a terminal and test it using the command you specified and the sound file.

By default alarm sound is played only once, but you can make it repeated by choosing the box next line. You can also define how many time it is repeated and what is the interval. Be carefull to set the interval longer than the length of the sound since orage does not wait for the previous sound to end before starting the next sound after the interval. Note that there is a silence button in visual alarms, so that you can stop the noise, but that only prevents the next play to happen, it does not interrupt currently playing alarm, which you should remember when using long lasting soundfiles.

orage can show two kinds of internal visual alarms. Orage window is a small alarm window showing the heading and note text. Notification is more fancy notification using libnotify. You need to have libnotify installed before you can define notification kind of visual alarm. orage -v shows if you have libnotify support included.

This makes it possible to use external alarms. You can run any operating system command or script. Common use for this is sending email.

You can test your alarm by pressing this. It raises the alarms immediately so that you can listen the sounds and see the windows.

You can either set alarm back to default options or you can store current settings to be default alarm for all new appointments. There is only one default alarm, which applies to all appointments.

Default is Basic and that makes it possible to define frequency and limit of the appointment only. Often that is enough and these settings are very easy and fast to do even if you are not familiar with calendars and alarms. Selecting Advanced gives you more possibilities and makes it possible to build complex recurrent appointments like for example:

This is the base repeating period. Default is no repeat (=None) and other possibilities are daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.

The next selection makes it possible to easily skip some periods. Default value is 1 and it means every time as specified in the Frequency selection. 2 means every second time and 3 every third time etc. For example if you want to schedule your meeting to happen every third week, select Frequency = Weekly and set Interval to 3. (Starting time is selected in the General tab and next event happens exactly 3 weeks from that)

orage allows you also to limit the repeating count:

Default is that all days are checked, which means that the event happens normally every day. By removing any check, you prevent the appointment to happen on that day. In other words, your appointment only happens on checked weekdays. The most natural usage of this is to use it with Frequency = Daily. You may want to have a chat meeting for example each Monday and Wednesday. You can do this by selecting Frequency = Daily and by checking only Weekdays Mon and Wed.

Selecting Weekly or Monthly actually causes the same thing. Deselecting any weekday for weekly or monthly or yearly repeating appointments causes all the remaining weekdays to become selected even though the original repeating selection only selects one day from the period. This is needed so that it is possible to schedule for example a meeting to happen every second week on Tuesday and Friday (Frequency = weekly, Interval = 2, Weekdays = Tue and Fri).

This setting can only be used for monthly and yearly repeating events. It can be used to select which weekday from the month or year is selected. For example if you want to schedule your meeting to happen on the first Tuesday of every month, you can first select Frequency = Monthly and then check only Tuesday from Weekdays and finally set this "which day" number to be 1 (choose the number located below Tuesday). Negative numbers count backwards starting from the end of period and zero means that this setting is not used. Frequency = Yearly, weekdays = Thursday only clicked and which say = -2 means second last Thursday of the year.

Here is list of exception times. - sign at the end of the row means exclusion where the appointment does not happen even though it was included in the repeat set. + sign means it is extra time to do the appointment.

You can remove the exception by double clicking it in the listing window. You can add new exception by first selecting the type (either excluded or included times) and then double clicking a day in one of the calendars below.

(Note that even though excluded time should be date, it can be shown as time in some systems. This is a way to workaround a bug where some calendar backend systems are not able to handle full date exclusions properly.)

Three small helper calendars, which show when the appointment will happen next. They show real time data, which is not stored in the system until you press save button.

Enter the name of the file which you want to copy into orage. You can do several files in a row by separating names with comma. After you have the file name in place, press Save and orage reads the contents in. After the file has been imported, those appointmenst are part of orage and can't be differentiated or put back into the file.

You can also import foreign files from the operating system using command line. This feature can be used to import ical files directly from the web by telling the browser (like firefox) that the action is to start orage

Enter the name of the file where you want orage to write appointments. You can choose either all appoinments or just a list of ids. Pressing save causes the appointments to be read and written to the external file. (The appointments are are not deleted from orage but are kept in it also.)

You can either revert all archived appointments back to the main orage file or force archiving. It is good idea to revert archive if you do exports since export does not look data from archive file.

It is possible to relocate and rename both active orage file and the passive archive file. Pressing save does the actual action. There are 3 options for these actions:

orage can include and maintain other than its main data file. It is possible to add (and remove) so called foreign files. They behave similarly than base data file, but they remain isolated, so that it is easy to move them back to the original system where they came from. This is mainly meant to be used when you need to maintain your calendar also in other than orage. Sometimes it is good idea to mark the file as read only, which prevents you from modifying any of the appointments in the corresponding file. (Orage uses some private ical components, which are not necessarily understood by the other system, so updates may cause problems for the other tool.)

You can also add foreign files from the operating system using command line: orage --add-foreign file

You should always set the default timezone for orage. It is possible to use also floating times, but then all times should be in floating form. It is a bad idea to mix floating and timezone times. Floating times tend to move to follow any timezones they see...

orage does not delete appointments automatically, so usually your calendar file grows bigger and because of that orage gets slower and takes up more memory from the system. Enabling automatic archiving causes old appointments to be moved from the active calendar file to passive history file after the selected time. This helps to keep the active file smaller and the application in good shape. Archiving is enabled by setting the threshold to other than 0 value. Of course it is also possible to manually delete appointments, but that removes them permanently and you will not be able to find them later.

Note that orage also splits recurring appointments so that if the original start date is older than threshold, that appointment is added to the archive file and the starting date in the active calendar file is updated to contain only values more recent than the threshold. This also saves time when orage is searching recurrent events.

Here you can define which sound command orage uses when playing sound files. Try testing some common commands like play or aplay from terminal to see what works in your system. You probably do not want to use full version of totem or mplayer since they will cause a video window also to appear and that most probably is not what you want.

Basically it is possible to do other than sound commands also since orage really only starts this program and gives it the sound file as parameter. But this is not the intention of this feature.

You can hide window borders and make the calendar window smaller by unselecting this option. This frees more space to your other applications from your workspace.

By unselecting this you can leave out the menubar in the top of the calendar window.

Select whether you want to see month and year controls in the main calendar window.

Controls day names visibility on top of the calendar window.

Controls visibility of week numbers on left of calendar.

You can hide TODO list in the main calendar by deselecting this.

You can hide EVENT list in the main calendar by setting this to zero. Non zero values means the number of days to show events for.

Show calendar window on all workspaces by selecting this.

Keep calendar window on top of all other windows.

Controls if calendar is visible in the taskbar.

Controls if calendar is visible in the pager.

Controls if calendar is visible in the systray. A small icon is presented in the systray if this is selected. It is recommended that you enable this feature. By clicking this icon orage is toggled visible or hidden. If you do not have orage in the systray, you have two other options to make the main calendar window visible: You can either click Orage-clock panel plugin or you can start orage again.

It is possible to define that orage starts in the background or as minimized. This option only affects the start of orage.

Controls which day is selected after orage main calendar window is hidden and comes visible again (for example by clicking orageclock panel plugin). Default value is off, which means that previously selected day will remain selected. Crossing this causes current date instead being selected.

Setting this causes orage to use dynamic icon in taskbar (if you have taskbar and you have selected to use taskbar in the Display tab). Note that this icon is used also other places where icon is used. Dynamic icon includes real month day number and also shows weekday in the top and month name at the bottom. (orage uses appreviations if real names are too long to fit to the available space.) You can revert back to old static icon by deselecting this.

You can define to start either the event list (=appointment list) or the day view window when you double click day numbers in the main calendar window.

Define how many days to show in the event list when it starts. (It is possible to change the number in the event list window.)