Calendars are an essential organizational tool for planning out your days, weeks, and months ahead. Beyond keeping yourself on track, customized calendars also make fantastic gifts for friends, family, clients, and team members.
With Microsoft Word’s versatile formatting features and calendar templates, you can easily create stylish calendars tailored to any purpose or preference. Whether you need a planner to map out vacations, track work projects, note important occasions, or just organize your everyday schedule, this guide will walk you through making polished calendars in Word that are sure to impress.
Getting Started with Calendar Templates
The easiest way to build a calendar in Word is to start with one of the many professionally designed calendar templates included in the software. Simply go to the File tab > New and type “calendar” into the search bar to browse the template options.
Calendar templates provide you with preset layouts, color schemes, fonts, and decorative elements that you can fully customize to your needs. With a template, much of the foundational calendar formatting is already handled, allowing you to focus on personalizing the details.
To open a template, select your favorite option after searching “calendar’ under the New tab. You can then edit all aspects of the template design like colors, text, images, and more to create exactly the calendar style you envisage.
Building a Calendar from Scratch with Tables
Alternatively, you can build a calendar from scratch in Word using tables to structure the layout. Here are the key steps:
- Insert a table with 6 rows and 7 columns for a standard monthly calendar format.
- Merge and center the cells in the first row to create the header displaying the month and year.
- Populate the first column with the days of the week.
- Fill the following columns with the correctly dated days of the month.
- Use table formatting options accessed by right clicking the table to customize colors, borders, height and width, and more to your styling preferences.
The benefit of constructing a calendar using Word’s table function is it allows meticulous control over every element in the formatting process. You can also easily adjust sizing and layout by adding rows or columns depending on your calendar purposes, whether tracking a full year or just a week.
Enhancing with Graphics, Images & Other Elements
Once your calendar structure is set up through a template or table, you can make it really stand out by complementing it with eye-catching visual elements.
Consider adding graphics like lines, shapes and icons as decorative touches. Use text boxes for important notes. Insert images at the top such as photos, your company logo, or thematic clipart.
Images and other illustrations will not only make your calendars more captivating, they can illustrate temporal concepts. For example, include summery beach scenes in June-August calendars or holiday symbols in November-December designs.
Microsoft Word equips you with a full suite of visual formatting features to deck out standard calendars with vibrant personality. Take advantage by getting creative with digital elements that make coordinating schedules and planning ahead more enjoyable.
Helpful Finishing Touches
Apply useful finishing formatting touches like hyperlinks, printable margins, and borders:
- Add hyperlinks to automatically connect dates to relevant websites or documents.
- Define printable margins so that your calendar prints perfectly on paper.
- Include borders around or in between certain cells or imagery to make specific elements stand out.
These extras require only a few clicks but substantially polish and optimize calendars for their intended use, whether digital or printed for hard copy wall mounting or handouts.
Sharing, Printing & Displaying Your Calendar
Once completed, share your calendar digitally by getting a shareable link through Microsoft Word’s sharing options accessed in the top-right.
For hard copies, preview print and define page setup for optimal paper display. Print through a connected desktop printer or at a copy center for specialty large format prints.
You also always have the options of saving your calendar as a PDF, image, or even printing it out for hand-coloring and crafting projects.
Finally, don’t forget about displaying your calendar designs in your home or office space. Printouts can be framed and wall mounted or you can print calendars on media like acrylic, metal, or wood to incorporate into desk displays.
Key Takeaways
The core fundamentals to remember when building calendars in Word are:
- Leverage pre-made templates to shortcut much of the formatting process or construct layouts using tables for precise control.
- Customize colors, text, borders and other stylistic elements to match your brand, themes, and decorative sensibility.
- Incorporate graphics, images, and embellishments like icons, lines, and text boxes to add visual flair.
- Use finishing touches like hyperlinks, defined print margins, and borders to polish calendars for intended utility.
- Print, share digitally, or explore creative display options to highlight your calendar designs.
With these tips and tricks, you can easily produce dazzling calendars in Microsoft Word tailored to any specifications or use case. Whether planning out your new year, collecting important dates, or pulling together a client gift, a thoughtfully crafted calendar makes time feel a little more organized and a lot more meaningful.
