Setting up a calendar in Excel for personal or professional use can be a great tool to organize and track work items and events, deadlines, important appointments, holidays, etc. The best part is that it you can setup a printable calendar so as to customize it for your needs for each month and just print directly from Excel.
Let’s cover step by step how to set up a calendar in Excel from scratch and personalize it for your needs.
Step 1: Setting Up the Basic Structure
- Create New Workbook: Open a new Excel workbook.
- Select Grid and Adjust Height/Width: Select a grid of 7*14 (7 columns and 14 rows) and add an outer border to define your grid. For columns 1 through 7, change column width to 20. For rows 1 and 2, change the row height to 30. For every alternate row starting at row 3 and through row 13, set row height to 18. These cells will contain the dates. For every alternate row starting at row 4 and through row 14, set row height to 70. These cells are added to update events, deadlines, notes, etc. below each date.
Step 2: Add Month, Days and Dates to Your Calendar in Excel
- Month and Year Title: For row 1, highlight all 7 columns, then “Merge & Center” and “Wrap Text”. Now, you can fill in the month and year manually each month. Or you can have a formula in there that automatically populates the current month and year. Below is the formula to auto populate the month and year in the format “November 2024”. You can change format according to your liking by modifying the below formula. Then, go to Home > Borders > Thick Outside Border and add borders encapsulating merged cells A1 through A7.
=TEXT(TODAY(),”MMMM YYYY”)
- Fill In Days of the Week: In row B, fill in the days of the week. Then write “Sunday” in cell B1 and drag across the columns in your grid, this will auto fill the days across column B.
- Add Borders to the Grid: Select all cells in the grid B1 through G14. Go to Home > Borders > All Borders and apply on all selected cells. Then add “Thick Outside Borders” to cells C1 through G14.
- Add Dates to Your Calendar: Determine the starting day for each month and start manually entering dates in your calendar. Center dates in the columns and Bold if required.
Step 3: Additional Formatting/Personalization Options
- Apply Text Wrapping for Notes: Apply text wrapping to cells that are meant for inputting events, deadlines or notes.
- Add Drop Down Menus: You can very well create a list of the common tasks that you need to do and just create a drop down menu which you can link to the notes/events cells. You can learn how to add drop down list to a cell in Excel here.
- Apply Background Colors: You can make this calendar more visually appealing by adding background colors to Month, Date and Day cells. You can also choose to color code weekends, important events and holidays differently.
- Save As Template: Once you have set up this calendar, you may want to save it as a template in your Excel templates to use as and when required. To do this, go to File > Save As > Choose the desired location and file name and save file as “Excel Template”. By default, the file type would be “Excel Workbook”. Choose “Excel Template” from the drop-down menu and save file to add it to your Excel templates.
Step 4: Print Your Calendar in Excel
- Adjust Orientation in Print Preview: Press “Ctrl + P”. This will open the print preview. From the options on the left, select Landscape Orientation as highlighted.
- Adjust Page Dimensions if It Doesn’t Fit on One Page: Go to View > Page Break Preview and adjust the dotted lines to see if your page fits on the print sheet. If it doesn’t and the rows or columns spill over to the next page, you may need to adjust the height or width of rows or columns in your grid to make it fit.
Now that you have your calendar in Excel ready, use it for hassle-free and efficient organization of your personal and professional tasks and other needs.
