I’ve just finished a set of single-page, entire-year calendars in various paper sizes for your downloading pleasure. As usual, the drawings are packed with features that you are free to completely ignore!
I thought I’d try and get on the ball this year and release a year-calendar (Jahreskalendar for our German fans) template before the new year actually began. And it is a good thing I did too, since the download actually shows FOURTEEN months. The extra two are for December 2018 and January 2020.
TWO-THOUSAND-TWENTY! Already?
If you’ve seen the year calendar I’ve made before–Visio 2010 Year-calendar (Jahreskalender) Template–you might remember that I offered “template boxes” for specifying the look of date boxes. I’ve continued that strategy, but extended it
Features Overview
This year’s offering allows you to configure just about everything “visually”. There’s no shape data anywhere to be found! The laundry list is as follows:
- Week-numbers (Kalendarwochen) built right in, so you can see which week you’re at, at a glance.
- Template boxes for specifying the line, fill, and text styles for
- Month-headers
- Weekdays
- Saturdays
- Sundays
- Holidays
- Customizable holiday list, so you don’t have to live with the ones I’ve given you.
- Customizable day names, e.g. in the language you speak.
- Customizable month names, e.g. in the language you speak.
- Configurable day abbreviations, e.g. “M”, “Mo”, “Mon”, “Monday”
- Configurable month abbreviations, e.g. “J”, “Ja”, “Jan”, “January”
- Custom page-grid that matches day sizes, so it is easy to resize Note and Block shapes to fit precisely over dates and ranges of dates.
If all that isn’t enough, I’ve also pre-created the year 2019 in these page sizes, to save you the trouble. The download document contains six pages
- US Letter
- US Legal
- US Tabloid
- Metric A4
- Metric A3
- Metric A2
Just flip to the page you want, and print it! Just be sure to check Print Current Page when you do send it down the wire, and be sure you’ve got selected page matching the paper size of the target printer!
The zip also includes the calendar in two different file formats:
- VSDX for Visio 2013 and newer
- VSD for Visio 2003 – 2010
The Calendar, In Action
So let’s not over-think this. The following content is your Help Manual for using the 2019 year-calendar, but there’s no needless over organization. Browse. Peruse. Read a bit. Look a bit.
Be amazed!
First off, it’s a calendar. The WHOLE year, plus “last December” and “next January”. The non-year months are faded out a bit to add clarity. Each month is a vertical column. You can format Saturdays, Sundays and holidays differently.
If you have a large-format printer, then you can make a gigantic one to fit on the wall. If the page size you want isn’t already built, no worries. The drawings are responsive. Just right-click on any of the page tabs, and choose Format Page. You can pick a new page size/ printer-paper size, and the shapes should all dynamically re-fit to your page size and margin choices.
This is what it looks like:
Kalendarwochen (Week Numbers)
I am aware that your German friends really like knowing which week-of-the-year it is. I had never heard of this before I moved to Germany. But some folks have mentioned that U.S. folks working in manufacturing use this as well. Maybe only when they talk to the Germans?
At any rate, the year-calendar displays the week numbers on the right-sides of the date blocks. Below, you can see the large-but-faint 19, 23, 27, 28 numbers. That feels about right for May, June and July, doesn’t it? There’s no setting governing these things. They’re just there, you don’t have to turn them on or off, nor do you need to format them in any special way:
Formatting Day Blocks and Month Headers
To change the formatting of month-headers and day blocks, go to the top-left corner of the drawing, then scroll off the page into the pasteboard area. There you’ll see “template boxes”. Change the line, fill, and text styling on these, and your drawing will react:
The attributes that will respond to your changes include:
- Fill Color
- Line Color
- Line Weight
- Font
- Font Size
- Font Color
- Font Style (bold, italic, etc.)
- Font Color Transparency
Below, I’ve made some format changes to the template boxes. Maybe you work Saturdays, so I’ve made the Saturday box almost-white to match the weekdays. I’ve switched Sundays to a pleasant blue color, and I’ve made holidays a gaudy, hard-to-look-at red, with a ridiculous font:
Adding Holidays or Work-free Days
You can enter holidays in the holiday box. Below, I’ve just edited the list to include the birthday of Mike Ditka, famed former coach of the Chicago Bears, as a custom holiday.
To do this, I just double-clicked the holiday-list shape. This gets us into text edit mode, where we can quickly type in new holidays. When editing holidays, keep these points in mind:
- Only one holiday per line
- The date must be enclosed in square brackets. This helps to prevents incorrect text-finds in the ShapeSheet logic.
- The date must include 8 numbers. Don’t: “2”. Do: “02“
- The date must be in “descending importance” format, so YEAR/MONTH/DAY. This prevents incorrect “finds”, and simplifies some regional-settings issues that occurred in the behind-the-scenes ShapeSheet logic.
- You can separate date parts with a “.” or a “/”, but you don’t have to.
- The text that comes after the date is meaningless from a calendar-functioning standpoint, but it’s nice for humans to read. The text won’t show up in the date blocks, unfortunately.
Above the drawing, also in the off-page pasteboard area, you’ll find controls for the display of text. You can enter lists of Day Names and Month Names. Just type in semi-colon-separated lists into the field-shapes. I’ve included pre-built lists in English, French, German…and…Klingon, so you can just cut and paste if one of those is your thing.
You can then specify what sort of abbreviations to use, using the check box controls. These control how much of the month name to show in the column headers, and how much of the day name to display in each date block. Just double-click or right-click a check box to check it. Remember, these are just Visio rectangles, with a bit of smart behavior behind them. They’re not really Windows Forms controls–hence the need for double-clicking or right-clicking to get them two work.
Here, we’re showing just the first letter of the month (in German), and the full day names (in Klingon):
And for you minimalists, just ONE letter. EVERYWHERE:
Choose a Size, Choose a Page
As I mentioned before, you should be able to change the paper/page size for any of the calendars, and the drawing should dynamically respond. But check out the built-in offerings first, it could save you some work and frustration! Just look for the page tabs at the bottom of the Visio drawing window, or click the All “drop-up” list, to get a more manageable vertical listing of page names:
Adding Notes
In general, the headers and date blocks are pretty much locked down. That is mostly to preserve the calculations that govern their displayed text, as well as the line, fill, and text formatting. However, you can drag shapes from the Document Stencil onto the page and type in custom text. I’ve provided three master shapes for this:
- 5-day Block
- 7-day Block
- Day Note
They are configured so that by default, they match the calendar’s grid. So, for example, when you drop the 5-day Block onto a page, it will be one day wide by exactly five days high.
Since the page has a custom grid, resizing these shapes should be a…snap. That is, the size of a shape will easily snap to match the grid of the calendar. I’ve also added these three shapes in the left-margin of each pre-built page, in case you don’t feel like hunting for the Document Stencil, which may not be visible by default.
Here, I”ve added some block shapes and a day note to the October column. Changing the color is simple enough, but you’ll need the Format panel (press F3) to adjust the transparency. I switched from the default red to a darker orange, and turned down the transparency a bit more so that the white text was more readable.
The note shape is transparent by default, and is good for placing over single dates:
That’s about it for Year Calendar 2019. Happy planning and scheduling!
Download “Visio Year Calendar for 2019” s!Aj0wJuswNyXlhzlb36BztxEVJoi3 – Downloaded 4003 times – 103.00 B
Are you a Chicago Guy?
Thought I’d let you know the Christmas holiday date format has the month and day reversed so it doesn’t display in the calendar as downloaded.
@Phil – no, not a Chicago guy, but for some reason, those old Saturday Night Live skits popped into my head when trying to come up with examples.
@Richard, Thanks for the heads-up and the sharp eyes! I’ve fixed the download.