What’s new

This page lists the major improvements since ACal 4 was published. A detailed list of changes and bug fixes can be found at the version history page.

New in ACal 4.5

Create and delete appointments in many calendars directly to Office 365

The Manage Many Calendars wizard now contains an option to use the Microsoft Office 365 login to connect directly to Office 365. The older log-in to Exchange option remains for those using on-site or other implementations of Exchange. This makes it easier to manage many calendars in Office 365

New in ACal 4.4

Print features re-introduced and improved

From January 2018 ACal‘s print feature had been unavailable due to incompatibility with other updated components. These problems have now been fixed and Print is back with a significant improvement – ACal will print the appointments in whichever calendar or calendars are currently displayed. This ability to combine two or more calendars overcomes a significant limitation.

Printing

New in ACal 4.3

NET 4.51

ACal is now based on the Microsoft .NET framework 4.51.

New in ACal 4.2

Rescheduling

Using the body (or notes section) of an Outlook appointment for lesson plans, meeting agendas, or other notes can be incredibly useful. However, you can hit a problem if a lesson or meeting that is part of a sequence has to be re-scheduled because there is no easy way to shuffle the notes in the whole sequence to their new dates.

Now ACal can do this for you.

Reschedule appointment notes

New in ACal 4.1

Control Colour-coding

ACal creates Outlook categories for each appointment it creates in order to make it easier to work with them. The colours allocated to each category are allocated by Outlook. It was possible to use Outlook’s All Categories  dialog to change them but it is fiddly and has to be done user by user.

Now, whether you are a single user or you are an admin managing many calendars. ACal lets you take control. There is an extra tab in both the basic Setup Data form and in the Manage Many Calendars wizard that lets you select the colour you want for each category.

Category colours in Setup Data Category Colours in Manage Many Calendars

Timetable time-span

In the past ACal assumed that when you created timetable appointments you wanted them for the whole year. This is not always the case.

Now when you create timetable appointments  from the Manage Many Calendars wizard, you can set the start and finish dates for the time span within which the timetable appointments will be made. By default the dates are the start and end of the academic year but this can be changed either by selecting a different start and/or end term or by setting specific dates. A similar screen appears when using the Setup Data form but only when updating the timetable.

Setting the time-span in Manage Many Calendars

Mid-year timetable updates

In many schools there are changes to the timetable during the course of the academic year. If there are just a few additions ACal‘s ability to check for duplicates means that you can just add the new timetable commitments and create the relevant appointments. However, it is rarely that simple. There will often be existing items that are changed or delete as well as simple additions.

Now, in the Setup Data form’s Timetable tab you can simply make the changes, indicate whether they are additions, changes or deletions, and ACal will do the rest. In the Manage Many Calendars wizard it is even easier. Simply import the new timetable details and leave ACal to compare it with the current one, work out what needs to be added, changed or deleted, then go ahead and do it.

Updating the timetable from the Setup Data from

Updating the timetable in Managing Many Calendars

Deleting appointments in Exchange / Office 365

Previously, ACal‘s Manage Many Calendars wizard offered only very basic delete features. You could only delete by selecting appointment categories.

Now you can enter text which will be searched for within the subject line of appointments in the calendars of staff you select and within the date range you specify. You can opt to review each item before it is deleted.

Deleting appointments in Manage Many Calendars

New timetable sources for Manage Many Calendars

Now, as well as SIMS and TimeTabler, ACal can understand files imported from Engage and Tabulex systems.

Importing timetable data