Monthly View Calendars

I needed to do some future planning the other day of the next few months on several fronts. I thought a monthly calendar page would be helpful for this to go at the start of each month in my A5 Malden which I am using the page per day diary insert.

I started playing around with iCal, but I found it quite slow inputting things, then I realised... why are you attempting to use an electronic calendar... so I closed the application went for a walk, watered the sun flowers, said good evening to my neighbours, walked the length of the garden, let my brain work through what to do to create a monthly calendar.

OK I thought, I could do my old trick of using MS Outlook to generate a calendar, but none of my existing appointments are on Outlook any more. No that won't do.. how about Google Calendar? I've used it for some time it mainly holds all my birthday reminders, I also tend to put things on there, so the rest of the family know were we are going to be etc.

So Google Calendar, it's free, all you need is a Google account or a Gmail account and there you have a calendar with Day, Week and Month views... ok if you have used Google Calendar you know what it can do... yes? The one button I had over looked... the print button!

What does this do... it offers different layouts and options for the current view (Daily, Weekly, Monthly) and it gives you a preview. When you click on 'Print' it sends you a PDF file, which you can then review before you print it. I tried this out with a couple of monthly layouts.

Both are quite a nice simple clean un-cluttered layout. I tried punching the sheets after printing them on A5 paper and found that the margins were not quite right but a small adjustment in the scaling setting on the printer to reduce the grid by a couple of percent did the trick.

So then I revisited iCal again, but this time with only a blank calendar and tried a similar trick with that.

Again quite a nice clean layout, but this one offers the mini calendar as a option for the previous month, this month and next month. If you turn off that option it expands the month grid in to that space. When you go to print, it will let you print to a printer or to pdf. Again with a little bit of adjustment to the scaling I managed to get it to fit an A5 sheet of paper without the punched holes causing problems with the printed text. I quite like the way they grey out the days of the previous month and the next month, so it concentrates your eye on the current month.

iCal of course is only available on the Apple Mac, but with Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, Hotmail Calendar all offering similar free on-line calendars, that you can print out, then there are quite a few options available for people interested in having a diary insert customised to their own requirements be it printed on high quality paper, or with different timings during the day etc.

I'm finding having a monthly calendar at the start of each month is a great boost to my ability to plan each month up to the end of this year. It is particularly useful for holidays and events that extend over several days.  Give it a try.