About Using the Participant Availability Subview

The Gantt chart, also called the Participant Availability subview, that appears below the Calendar Detail form for all nonrecurring activities can tell you a great deal about an activity and its participants. The Participant Availability subview is shown in Figure 12-2, "Participant Availability Subview".

If you do not see the Gantt chart in the Participant Availability subview, you might see a large button called Show Participant Availability. Click that button to see the Gantt chart. Gantt charts are not available for recurring activities.

Figure 12-2 Participant Availability Subview

The following are tips to help you get the most out of this subview:

• Click Add Employee, Add Resource, or Add Contact in the Participant Availability subview to add new participants to an appointment.

• Highlight a participant and click Remove Participant in the Participant Availability subview to remove an existing participant from the appointment.

• All the schedules you see in the subview are converted to the time zone specified in your time zone preferences. For example, if your calendar displays Pacific time, and you are viewing an activity involving a user in the Eastern time zone, the Eastern time zone user's schedule is converted to Pacific time for you. If the Eastern time zone user is looking at the same activity in her calendar, it is converted to Eastern time.

• You cannot use the Participant Availability subview in conjunction with any recurring appointment.

• Employee working hours have a white background. Nonworking hours have a dark gray background.

• Previously scheduled appointments appear as blue blocks on the calendar. The current appointment appears as a band of light yellow framed between a red line and a green line. You can change the start and end times of the current appointment by holding your cursor over the arrow that appears at the top of either line. Click and drag the line to the time you desire.

• Any changes you make in the Participant Availability subview are automatically reflected in the Calendar Detail form. Likewise, any changes you make in the Calendar Detail form are automatically reflected in the Participant Availability subview.

• Contacts appear in the Participant Availability subview, but have no associated schedules.

• Icons are used to indicate the participant type. A face indicates an employee, a phone book indicates a contact, and a projection screen indicates a resource.

• You can choose to display only your working hours or all 24 hours of the day. To make the choice, select the desired value from the Show field in the Participant Availability subview. You can also set up this preference from the User Preferences screen. For more information, see "Setting Up Default Participant Availability Subviews".

• Hold your cursor over a participant's name to find out more information about that participant, including title, account, and time zone.

• You can advance the Gantt chart to a future date by using the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the chart. If you want to see more than three days later than the appointment's current date, you must reset the start date in the Calendar Detail form.