From a single calendar view, you can look at appointments from an individual calendar. Or you can consolidate several calendars — like one for home, one for your kid’s activities, and one for your job — in a single view. Here’s how:
To pick the calendars you want to display, follow these steps:
Tap the Calendars button at the upper-left corner of the screen.
That summons a Show Calendars overlay.
Tap each calendar you want to view by tapping its entry.
A check mark appears. Tap an entry again so that a given calendar won’t appear, and the check mark disappears. To show all the calendars, tap Show All Calendars. To make them disappear, tap Hide All Calendars. In the example shown here, all the calendars are selected.
You can also choose to view your calendar(s) in different views:
List view: List view isn’t complicated. As its name indicates, List view presents a list of current and future events on the left side of the screen, and an hour-by-hour view of the day that’s highlighted on the right.
About eight hours of the highlighted date are visible in landscape mode; about ten are visible in portrait mode. You can drag the list up or down with your finger or flick to rapidly scroll through the list. To switch the day shown, tap the right or left arrow at the bottom of the screen, or tap or drag the timeline.
Day view: Day view reveals the appointments of a given 24-hour period (though you have to scroll up or down on the right side of the screen to see an entire day’s worth of entries). As in the List view, you can drag or tap the timeline to move to a new date or tap the left or right arrows for the same purpose.
Week view: As you’d expect, the Week view shows your events over a seven-day period. Again, use the arrows or timeline at the bottom of the screen to change the time frame that you see. Notice that the timeline reflects one-week intervals in Week view, which is the way it should be.
Month view: When your iPad is in Month view, you can see events from January to December. In this monthly calendar view, a colored dot (designating a specific calendar) and short description appear on any day that has appointments or events scheduled. Tap that day to see the list of activities the dot represents.
Year view: The Year view is new in iOS 5, but only for the iPad — it’s not available on the iPhone or iPod touch as of this writing. Dates with events associated with them appear in color. The darker the hue, the more events you have on that date.