The Compact Calendar is a versatile planning calendar that is easy to customize and print with Microsoft Excel. It comes in three different week styles, and is localized for different countries by volunteers around the world.
(Impatient people can skip to 2012 Compact Calendar Download Link :-)
About the Compact Calendar
The Compact Calendar is a simple printable calendar that’s presented 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 one giant stack of available time, it’s easy to count weeks and figure out what can fit around meetings, holidays, and weekends.
It’s very 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 redraw itself before your eyes thanks to some Excel trickery. No macros required! You can add/subtract holidays yourself, type in notes on the spreadsheet.
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 to modify the Compact Calendar. 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:
2012 USA Compact Calendar
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.
Download USA Versions 2012
These are the very latest versions of the Compact Calendar for 2012, with all three week templates (xltx). If you don’t have Microsoft Excel 2007, there are also printable PDFs included.
Download USA 2012 by Dave Seah w/ major US holidays. This includes both PDF (US Letter) and Excel templates.
For outside the United States, the A4 Package is probably what you want. It includes both A4-sized PDFs and Excel templates that you can customize with your own holidays.
The filename will be CompactCalendar2012-US.zip or CompactCalendar2012-A4.zip, depending on which archive you download.
2012 International Calendars
If you’ve made a version of the Compact Calendar for your locale and would like to share, put it on a page on your own website and I’ll link to it here; just let me know through my contact form.
Note: Not all international versions use the latest Compact Calendar code, so feature sets and formatting may vary.
Asia / Australia / New Zealand 2012
2012年日曆 (Hong Kong) by Fung Lee
2012 カレンダー (Japan) by Yoshiomi KURISU
Kalendar 2012 (Malaysia) by Oboitoke
Americas 2012
Calendario 2012 (Argentina) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Brazil) by Ricardo Cabral
Calendario 2012 (Chile) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Columbia) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Ecuador) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Guatemala) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Mexico) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Peru) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Uruguay) by Jeroen Sangers
Calendario 2012 (Venezula) by Jeroen Sangers
Europe 2012
Calendrier 2012 (France) by Jean-Philippe Papillon
2012 Naptár (Hungary) by Tamás Buti
Kalendarz 2012 (Poland) by Jacek Synowiec
2012 Kalendár (Slovakia) by Michal Poppe
Koledar 2012 (Slovenia) by Jernej Zupanc
Calendario 2012 (Spain) by Jeroen Sangers
Middle East 2012
none listed yet
Country Not Listed?
I post links to new calendars for 2012 as I get them. If you’d like to contribute, modify the USA Excel templates (here’s the ZIP archive) with your country’s holidays, ZIP the templates, and then post on your blog. Tell me where to link to it!
Otherwise, check last year’s 2011 Compact Calendar Page; you may be able to find one you can quickly update, though it will not have all of the current 2012 version’s features.
Other Versions of the Compact Calendar
- Rene Springmeier has a PDF calendar maker / tracker inspired by the Compact Calendar called The PDF Calendar.
- Yoshiomi KURISU has programmed an online Compact Calendar Creator that will even create PDFs.
- If you’re using Numbers on the Mac, Michael has updated the Numbers version of Compact Calendar for 2012 on his mega template site.
Other Productivity Tools
You can find more printable productivity tools on The Productivity Tools page
Rzym 
Cheryl Jung 
Paul 
Kasia 
Hi, thank you very much, but there isn’t calendar for México.
Hello Luis,
I have created a calendar for Mexico, available from http://canasto.es/calendario-compacto/
Last year I found a calendar like this but there was a line that jogged showing the break between each month. Is that still available? Thanks, Carol
Luis: Hopefully someone will make a version for Mexico.
Carol: This version of the calendar has the month breaks.
Hi David…
With your great compact calendar I create a tool that can create any compact calendar online between two date, you can test it at: http://calendario.bergonzini.com/
Hope it help :)
Europe 2012 / Polish (Polski):
Kalendarz Kompaktowy 2012 http://dobraorganizacja.pl/kalendarz-kompaktowy-2012/
David,
I love this, and have been using it for over 3 years for my athletes while planning their year. I have another spreadsheet with the dates only for Mondays that I manually enter across the top in a landscape format for easy screen viewing of a year.
My question is, can this be modified to show only the dates and week #s of teh Mondays? I looked at the cells’ formulas and it doesn’t look like I can delete the rest of the days, maybe hide them? But I would like to have a landscape format.
What would you suggest besides manually entering the dates as I have done so far?
Jacek: Thanks for the calendar translation!
Suzanne: That’s very cool how you’re using it for planning for your athletes! To create your Monday-only horizontal format, you could probably modify the formulas to jump by 7 days instead of by 1. So, what you could do is enter your starting Monday date in (for example) cell A1. Then, in cell
B2B1, enter the formula=A1+7and then duplicate that cell across. That should work in theory :)Pingback: Compact calendar 2012 :: Paul Dupree at Unison Consulting
Hi Dave,
I use the Compact Calendar religiously. It’s wonderful. But I use Excel 2008 for the Mac. Evidently, the new conditional formatting rule for the blue lines over/under the week containing the first of the month isn’t being migrated at all. The other three are, other than gradients aren’t an option for the first day. If you could send me or otherwise publish that rule (that I can’t see completely from the video) maybe I can work it in.
Thanks!
Doug: I know I already replied in email, but I’m just posting the solution here for future reference:
If row 1 starting with cell A contains a date, apply the formula:
Formula for Condition: =DAY(A1)>DAY(A2) Format: Format A1 with border on bottom
Pingback: Compact Calendar 2012 Edition
David,
I ported the compact calendar to Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet. You can find it here.
Thanks,
Michael
Michael,
Any chance you could include the ISO week numbers?
Hi David,
I updated the French version with our complex school holidays. http://www.is.setec.fr/calendrier
Best regards.
Jean-Philippe
i have a question i am making or design a calendar for 2012 and i design everything from the scratch and am not sure what format to use do you have to use photoshop or indesign also i have picture going along with thanks
Here is the UK version: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkyxK00VLnSidEl1SS1sZjZiVlpuRnJIY1JmUW9IRHc#gid=0
According to the Directgov site (http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/Timeoffandholidays/DG_073741), the Spring Bank Holiday has been moved to the 4th June 2012, and we’re getting the 5th off to help HRH celebrate her Diamond Jubilee.
Thanks for pointing it out. My anti-monarchic bias made me overlook the change and addition. I have updated the calendar.
Thanks for the calendar. One suggestion for a “continuous improvement” would be to add a column for the work week. Work weeks are super useful for planning big projects.
Thanks! Mike
oops! never mind, I found it! :)
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Hey mate,
thanks a lot for this calendar. Really helpful and clean!
Cheers!
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Hi Dave!
Excellent work as usual – I tool the liberty to cobble together an Italian version and it’s currently here: http://www.pa-mar.net/Main/Work/%20Calendario%20Compatto.html – as you noted elsewhere I used an old version of the template, and will try to improve it ASAP, but for the time being I want to have at least an usable version for Italy online.
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Gracias por el calendario!! Cada año lo descargo, muy útil!!
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Muy bueno el calendario compacto
How about a mac version ??
Thanks! This is fabulous!
Pages like this and people like you make the WWW glorious. Thanks.
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Excellent tool, thank you for sharing it. I added Columbus Day to the holiday list for the United States. It’s the second Monday in October.
I’ve been looking for this utility for a decade. Thank you so much for making it available.
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Turkish 2012 and all years Compackt Calender ready now!
[Download Now] (http://hartekin.name.tr/news/kompakt_takvim/2010-10-15-53)
2012 ve tüm yıllar Kompakt Takvim kullanıma hazır!
[Hemen İndir] (http://hartekin.name.tr/news/kompakt_takvim/2010-10-15-53)
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Canadian version – I came across this site that has Canadian versions of Compact Calendar: http://andryou.com/playground/compactcalendar/
I build a Google Docs version. Sadly, it’s not as automated as the Excel version; as far as I can tell, Google Docs doesn’t have conditional formatting, so I had to do formatting for month boundaries and holidays (US) by hand. This one is an 18-month Monday-Sunday version starting January 2012; for a 12-month one, just delete rows off the bottom.
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This is amazing!! Thanks so much–it’s exactly what I need. Any chance I can get the 2011 download? I’m trying to count weeks…
Thanks for the calendar. I love this. :)