Visualize the Year Intuitively as a “Candy Bar of Time”

QUICK PDF DOWNLOADS US PDF | A4 PDF

The Compact Calendar presents days as a continuous candy bar of time. Weeks are presented as a stack of available time with no gaps, making it easier to count-out days naturally as you think.

You can plan up to an entire year on a single sheet of paper! Print out a stack of them and keep them handy for when you need to roughly define project milestones or calculate recurring dates. These are great for taking notes during a planning meeting!

I’ve heard of people using them for estimating the gestation period of pregnant animals and planning family vacations. I’d love to hear more about your use, so please send me an email and share your story with me!

REF: 2006-0206

You can easily use Microsoft Excel to print variations with your own start/end dates. For convenience, I’ve also made the Compact Calendar available in several downloadable packages, and many others have chipped-in with their own versions for their country. Download the package you want in the sidebar on the right of the page.

About the Compact Calendar Package

If you download the Excel version, you can change the starting date to generate a new calendar for any year you need with your own holidays.

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. Optionally, you can download just the PDFs in either A4 or US Letter sizes.

The week styles are:

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

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.

Enjoy!