The Compact Calendar 2013

The Compact Calendar is a versatile planning calendar that is easy to customize and print from Microsoft Excel. It comes in three different week-styles, and is localized for different countries by volunteers around the world.

About the Compact Calendar

The Compact Calendar is a simple printable calendar that presents days as a continuous candy bar of time. It fits on a single page, and is easy to print out for use during planning or group scheduling. Because the weeks are presented as a stack of available time, it’s easy to block out days naturally, making notes about meetings, holidays, and weekends.

It’s easy to customize the Calendar too. If you need to change the starting date, just type in the new date and the entire calendar–including holidays–will recalculate before your eyes. You can also add/subtract holidays (highlighted as orange).

The download comes as a ZIP archive containing three Excel 2007 templates and six PDF versions, for all three week styles in both A4 and US Letter sizes.

The week styles are:

Week starting on Sunday – your typical home calendar week.
Week starting on Monday – your business working calendar, with ISO 8601 week numbers.
Week starting on Saturday – for Arabic countries.

While the Excel templates include US holidays, it’s pretty easy to customize them for any country.

TIP: If you’d like to know more about the design and use of the calendar, the page Using the Compact Calendar will give you the additional details.

Modifying the Compact Calendar

You’ll need Microsoft Excel 2007 or better to modify the Compact Calendar’s XLTX files. If you are using an older version of Office on Windows, this downloadable service pack from Microsoft may help.

NOTE: The Compact Calendar is saved as an Excel Template (XLTX) file. If you double-click an Excel template file, it opens a copy that you can save without modifying the master template. If you want to edit the template itself, you should use FILE->OPEN menu from within Excel itself instead of double-clicking the file icon.

After you open the .xltx file, there are several worksheets (see the bottom of the screen) for the 12-month, 16-month, Holiday, and Instructions table:

Modifying the starting day of the calendar is very easy: just edit the starting date by typing in a new one. The calendar will update automatically.

If you need to make a longer calendar, that’s easy too: just extend the range as you would normally with any list in Excel. Incidentally, the Excel spreadsheet also includes a 16-month calendar as a separate worksheet.

Changing the background colors is a little trickier; you’ll have to edit the conditional formatting in use on the worksheet. This video might help:

Downloading Notes

Please note that Microsoft Excel 2007 or newer is required. Other software like Open Office, Google Docs, and Numbers may import the Excel spreadsheet, but due to differences in the way they handle dates you should double-check that the calendars are correct.

For the official USA version, each zip archive includes with three templates (xltx). Printable PDFs included in each download. If you are using an older version of Excel, see Microsoft’s update directions to add XLSX/XLTX file compatibility.

The international versions are NOT created by me. Please read the instructions on the international contributor’s website for a description of the download content.