Excel Calendar Template Generator

About this template

This produces a calendar you write in rather than one you read. Each month is its own worksheet laid out as a seven-column grid, and every date sits in a short row above a tall, wrapped cell that is there for whatever the day holds - a shift, a delivery, a lesson, a deadline.

It is for the calendar that ends up printed and pinned somewhere: a wall planner, a rota, an editorial schedule, a school or holiday calendar, a project month view for people who will never open a project tool. If you want a calendar to type into and hand round rather than to sync, a spreadsheet grid is a better fit than a calendar app.

With the defaults you get twelve sheets, tabbed January to December. On each, row 1 is the month and year banner, row 2 carries the weekday names in the order you chose, and the weeks run down the sheet as pairs of rows: a 24-pixel row holding the date numbers and a 64-pixel row beneath it, wrapped, for your notes. Columns are 140 pixels wide, the weekday header is frozen, and weekends are shaded unless you turn that off.

The dates are worked out when the file is generated - the weekday the 1st falls on is computed in UTC, so it is right for any year between 1900 and 2200 and cannot drift with the timezone of the machine you generate it on. February gets 29 days in a leap year. That also means the grid holds values rather than formulas: nothing recalculates, so changing the year inside the sheet will not move the days. Generate the year you want here instead.

How to use it

1. Choose the year and the week start before downloading - Year, Monday or Sunday start, weekend shading, and whether you want all twelve months or a single one are all fixed at generation. The grid is drawn to match, so these are not settings you can flip afterwards.
2. Write in the tall row under the date - That cell has text wrapping switched on, so a long entry grows down the line rather than running across the neighbouring days. Alt+Enter (Option+Enter on a Mac) starts a new line inside the cell if you want several items on one day.
3. Move between months with the sheet tabs - Each month is a genuinely separate worksheet with nothing pointing at any other, so you can reorder, rename, duplicate or delete them freely.
4. Set the print layout once - Page Layout > Orientation > Landscape, then Fit Sheet on One Page, prints a month per page at a readable size. Under Print Titles, setting Rows to repeat at top to $1:$2 keeps the banner and weekday names on every page if a month spills over.
5. Give yourself more room to write - Select the note rows and drag any row edge to make them all taller, or widen the columns. Because nothing on the sheet is a formula, resizing, inserting and deleting cannot break anything.
6. Export the whole year as one PDF - Right-click a sheet tab and choose Select All Sheets, then export to PDF - all twelve months come out as a single document in tab order.

Customising it

• Block out recurring days by selecting a whole weekday column - every Wednesday, say - and filling it, since each weekday keeps the same column all month.
• Mark holidays and closures by selecting the date cell and its note cell together and applying a fill from Home > Fill Colour; the weekend shading is a plain fill too, so a different colour reads as a different kind of day.
• Turn a month into a work planner by hiding the weekend columns: with a Monday start those are columns F and G. Right-click the column headers and choose Hide.
• Add a week-number column by inserting a column at the left and typing the numbers in, or a totals column at the right if you are counting hours - with no formulas on the sheet, inserting columns cannot break a reference.
• Build a two-page-per-month version by copying a sheet, deleting the second half of the weeks on one copy and the first half on the other, then printing both at a larger size.