Below you can download the .hol file for the Clarksville Montgomery County School System 2010-2011 Calendar.  “What is an ‘.hol’ file?”, you might ask.  It’s a “Holiday” file for Microsoft Outlook.  If you work in just about any kind of a business setting, you probably use Microsoft Outlook for your e-mail, contacts, calendar, etc…  If you do, you know what a hassle it is to input a ton of dates at one time.  Microsoft uses these .hol file to add lists of Holidays to Outlook based on what part of the world you are in.  We can create our own Holiday list however, and it is a great way to get a ton of dates into Outlook at once.  Especially, if there are a lot of people who need those dates on their calendars.  I’ve created these files at work to add the coming year’s events to every one’s calendars,  very handy.  So, how do you use it.  Simple…

1. Download the following file, “CMCSS10-11Cal.hol”, below.
2. Double Click on the file.
3. A pop-up window will give you check box options, Teacher or Student Calendars. Choose one or both.
4. Click OK.
5. The Dates (35 for Teachers, 51 for Students) will be added to your Microsoft Outlook Calendars.

Easy, huh.  Yeah, it is.  So, enjoy Clarksville Montgomery County School System.  I typed it all up for you.  All you have to do is use it. 

NOTE: I find it useful to Color Code all of these together so I can spot them easily.  You can do the same, by changing the view in and outlook and sorting by location of the events.  All the events with the location CMCSS 2010-2011 (Student/Teacher) Calendar will be grouped together.  You can simply select them all and change their category and color code.  Voila! Enjoy. 

It’s also very simple to create these files. 

• Open Notepad on your computer, or your favorite plain text editor.
• The First Line of the .hol file is the Location and must be entered exactly.
  • [Name of the List] 35
  • There MUST be a space after the closing bracket.
  • The number is the number of dates, i.e. events.
• Hit return and add your first date/event in this format.
  • Name of the Event, YYYY/MM/DD
  • That’s Name of the event (Do not use special Characters, it will cause issues, text only), followed by a comma, then a space, the the date in the above format.
• Hit return and keep adding events in this manner. 
• When you’re done, add up the number of dates/events and put that number at the top of the list.
• Save it with the file extension .hol
• You’re done!
• It should look something like this.

[CMCSS 10-11 Teacher Calendar] 3
Staff Development, 2010/08/04
Scheduled In-Service, 2010/08/05
Scheduled In-Service, 2010/08/09

Have fun making these.  They might take you a few minutes to create, but they will save everyone else a lot of time.