The Academic Compact Calendar (ACC) is designed to provide a compact view of the academic school year, with plenty of space for making annotations. It’s based on the popular Compact Calendar, with modifications to start the year on an arbitrary date.
It’s great for estimating and planning projects. And if you have Microsoft Excel 2007 or better, you can easily recalculate the dates for your own particular year.
The Academic Compact Calendar is a printable calendar worksheet designed in Microsoft Excel. The magical part of this is that you can easily change the starting date of the calendar, and the dates will automatically update along with a set of key holidays.
If you don’t want to bother with Excel, I’ve also made a downloadable PDF that starts from August 15, 2011, with key Federal holidays highlighted for the United States. As a bonus, I have also tweaked the typography in Illustrator and added the holiday names so it is extra-nice.
What You Can Do
It’s easy to highlight your breaks and special holidays using the standard
Excel shading tools; the calendar will keep the months and
holidays highlighted through automatic formatting.
The Compact Calendar is great for printing out for “doodle planning” during for impromptu scheduling. Because time is presented as a continuous chunk, it’s easy to count weeks and estimate effort. It is a more intuitive way of presenting your calendar as a “candy bar” of available time.
You can also select rows within Excel and “Print Selection” to print just a portion of the year. Useful for short-term projects.
I sometimes also print these out and tape them to available surfaces, like the inside of a notebook, to have a handy calendar available. You can trim the calendar to size.
Download the Academic Calendar Template
REQUIRES Microsoft Excel 2007 or greater
(it might work with Excel 2003, but I haven’t tested it)
Instructions
Download using the link below, unzip the archive. In the
Excelfolder, you’ll see files named something likeAcademicCompactCalendar.xltx. This is a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template.Double-click the file (Windows) and a new spreadsheet will be created based on the template.
Print it out. Or, annotate the calendar with your own notes.
Optionally you can copy the
.xltfile into your Microsoft Excel templates folder. This gives you the ability to create new calendars using Excel’s New Document command.
USA Versions
ZIP Archive with both Excel and PDF versions, Week-starting Monday or Sunday, w/ US Holidays
Individual PDFs (same as in the ZIP archive above)
PDF 2011-2012 Week starting Sunday
Other Versions
I see that Andrew Hall has created one for the UK.
Related Tools
For more information about using the Compact Calendar, check out the original version.
You can find more printable productivity tools on The Printable CEO™ Series page
