Get organised with a free scheduling service

Load a web browser and click once on the Address or Location line. Type in www.cozi.com and press Return. When the site loads, click on the Get Cozi button and at the next screen choose a user name, enter an email address and make up a password, then click Next. Finally, add the details of any other adults and kids who’ll be using the account, read and agree to the terms and conditions and click the Done button to get started.

At the next screen enter the sign-up email address and password and then click the Sign in button to open the Cozi home page. This is where the website displays appointments, tasks, and the family journal; and from here it’s possible to send reminders to other family members when they need to do something. For now, let’s personalise it a bit by uploading a photo of the Durmans, our make-believe family. Click on the Add a family photo link to start.

Click the Browse button and then, when the dialogue box opens, navigate to the folder where the photograph is stored. Click on it once and then click the Open button. Back at the Cozi website, click the Upload button. After a moment, the photograph will upload and the site will display it at the top left next to the family surname. That’s better. Now let’s add a few appointments by clicking once on the calendar.

By default Cozi opens up the week view (which is actually more of a four-day view). Add an appointment by clicking once in the little text entry box at the bottom of the calendar window and type something in – Cozi is clever enough to recognise sort-of plain English, so typing in ‘6:30pm football practice tomorrow’ should be enough to create a new appointment at the right time on the right day. Press Return or click the Enter button to continue.

When the appointment appears in the calendar, hover the mouse pointer over it – a little information box pops up showing us that the appointment has a start time but no finish. Let’s fix that by clicking once on the appointment line itself and then adding a few details. This detailed appointment description box lets us specify an end time by clicking the little clock and picking it from a list. We can also choose whether or not the event is repeated in a similar way – here we’ve chosen Every Friday. Click Save to confirm the changes.

Notice the colour codes along the top of the calendar? Each one is assigned to the adults and kids we set up in Step 1 and Cozi makes it easy to organise the calendar so that those people involved in an appointment can review their schedules more quickly. Double-click on the main calendar window to open the detailed appointment dialogue box and create a new date for the diary. Since this is a lunch date between dad and his daughter, we’ll only tick their names in the Who section. Set the other details and then click Save.

Here we’ve gone ahead and added a few more appointments – notice that by ticking the Who boxes mentioned in the previous step in various combinations, we’ve created appointments for the whole family as well as some that only relate to one or more family members. In the meantime, we’re going to create another kind of appointment – one that lasts a full day – by typing in ‘Sunday Mum’s day off’. Cozi recognises we’re creating a day-long appointment and adds it to the calendar.

It’s possible for any member of the family who’s visiting the site to filter out those appointments that don’t involve or concern them. Let’s try it. Imagine Mum is looking at the calendar, trying to work out when David’s got some free time – perhaps to do some extra studying. She doesn’t need to know that Lily is having lunch with Dad on Saturday and, by clicking on David’s name above the calendar, can remove any appointments that don’t involve him, leaving only those that do.

As well as the weekly view, there’s also a monthly one. Open it by clicking the Month button in the top-right corner above the calendar. If the appointments are a bit squashed, hover the mouse pointer over any of them to reveal the appointment details. Here we’re showing yet another kind of appointment – an event that lasts longer than one day. We entered this half-term holiday in the detailed appointment dialogue box, and simply picked the start and end dates from the pop-up calendars there.

OK, let’s look briefly at another of Cozi’s features – making lists that can act as reminders for the whole family. Click the Shopping List link on the horizontal menu at the bottom of the screen to display empty lists for groceries, wholesale and other. Click the Groceries icon at the top and then start entering information by clicking anywhere in the empty list and typing. Add as many ingredients to the list as required (we’re making a curry) to have Cozi remember and display them.

It’s possible to create new lists as well as editing the existing ones. Since ‘Wholesale’ doesn’t make much sense, click once on the icon at the top and then, when the empty list appears on the screen, double-click on the title to highlight it for editing. Then type in a new name – in this example, it’s ideas for birthday presents. Here we’ve gone on to add some ideas and marked one of them as complete by clicking the little tick to the left of the item.

Cozi also includes a diary for notes and photos. Click the Family Journal link on the bottom menu and at the next screen, click the ‘Jot down a moment’ button. Type in some text to describe the event and then, if there’s a photo associated with it, click the Browse button. Use Windows’ file commands to find the right picture, click on it once to select it and then click the Open button. Finally, click the Save button to add the finished entry to the journal.

Add some more journal entries in the same way and then click the Home link on the bottom menu to return to the main Cozi page. Notice that the calendar displays entries for that day and the next and that the latest journal entry and last edited list also appear. See the little Messages box? Use this to send email reminders to those Cozi users who’ve added their email addresses – sadly SMS messaging is only available in the US. Click the Send button to despatch the reminder.

Finally, Cozi has a neat screensaver. Click the Collage button on the main page and at the next screen, click Download. Follow the instructions to download and install the software, ignoring any Windows security warnings, accepting the licence agreement and all the default settings. When the program’s installed, either click the Change screen saver settings button or right-click on the Windows Desktop and choose Display Properties. Click the Screen Saver tab and then the Settings button to configure the screensaver to display family photos and that day’s schedule.