A while back I was forced, against my will, into using Outlook; my university has an exchange server, and the sysadmins have switched off the IMAP interface to prevent people from using Outlook for shared calendering, while using a sane mail program for mail. This is a pity, because I don't mind the Outlook calendar. It does the job reasonably, it's much more mature than Sunbird which I used previously, and the sharing is nice — although generally fails as most of my meetings involve someone who isn't using either Outlook or the exchange server.
Given this, then, it's a pity that my first experience of Outlook calendar was so negative. For those of you will Outlook, try this...
Instantly you Calendar has become complete CrapWare; if you have lots of meetings already in there, then, it will be obviously so—this view shows all meetings as the time between when they were created and when they finish. Useless! If you have very few meetings, you might not realise that anything has happened. But now, if you select a time block and go "New Appointment", you will book a meeting ending at the end of the selection block and starting at the current time.
It took me three weeks to sort this one out, during which time, I had to enter all apoointments by typing the start and stop times in manually. Fabulous.
Oh yeah, if you do this, to get out, repeat the first three steps, then:
and that's it.