Howdy, strangers! It’s a been awhile since I’ve posted any new content, but I’m pleased to announce the 2025 Monthly Planning Calendar for your downloading pleasure!
Monthly Planning Calendar Overview
The idea of a planning calendar is to have a few columns for each day in a month. The columns can be assigned to family or team members, life categories, whatever. The sky’s the limit! Or in this case, five column’s the limit.
Here’s what page 1 looks like out of the box:
You have one month for one page, the days of the month range from top-to-bottom, and you have columns next to each date for adding notes, appointments, TODOs, etc.
Typically, you would print out each month, then magnet it to your local whiteboard. As engagements come up, you could then pencil-in info the old-fashioned way (like my wife does). If you know of appointments at print time, you edit them within Visio. Just select a day-cell and type! This can be faster…and possibly more legible! I think it’s nice having something hung on the wall, and not have to dig into some sub-page on a mobile device!
A typical June might look something like below. I’ve pre-typed in a few of the items. And it looks like Chris has “hand-written” a note on June 5th. June 4th is set up as a fake holiday–note the automatic formatting! There’s a Notes Block applied to the weekend for both Chris and Frank.
The calendar comes with various options and controls. You can change the look for the whole calendar using these controls, which are located in the left margin on the January page. Here we can see that a crazy person has attempted to do some design work:
TODO I neglected to make the day-label column stretch with wider text. If you change the default font it’s best to use narrower font-faces. If I get time, I’ll fix this and post a new version. Look for “update:” at the top of the article in the future.
Planning Calendar Features
This Visio calendar document does a lot of stuff (at least internally). The fact that it is already the 6th of January (but I started on this last year) is testament to how much work I’ve put in to it (and it’s still not perfect!) Anyway, to quote the great Joerg Sprave from the Slingshot Channel,
LET ME SHOW YOU ITS FEATURES!
You can tweak the look and behavior of the calendar using special “control shapes” in the left margin of the first page (January), as well as the column headers at the top of page “1”.
- Quickly change the page size (no digging through Page Setup…)
- Choose the number of planning columns (1-5)
- Set the week’s starting day (Sunday or Monday)
- Change line, fill, and text formatting for days, weekends, holidays, as well as for the heading
- Specify a list of holidays that you care about
- Set the default column-header text for all months
- Enter text for individual day cells
- Add highlighting blocks to various date and column ranges
- View the calendar week/Kalendarwoche
- Add special Notes Block shapes for highlighting blocks of shapes, or for overriding built-in day-cell formatting.
A big challenge in building something like this is the organization and design for a LOT of shapes. If you count just the calendar-related shapes in this document, you get–spread across 12 pages–a whopping 2220 shapes! And that is just top-level shapes. The number doesn’t include sub-shapes within groups.
Of course, I use code to help me generate the calendar, but I also use SmartShape features to help parameterize objects so that changing things is easier. Such parameterization results in bonus features for you, the Downloading Public.
Default Column Labels
Since “Column 1”, “Column 2”, “Column 3” aren’t very useful headers, you can change the default column headers by editing the column headers on page 1. You can see this in the spastic example above, where the default columns are “Bob”, “Chris”, “Frank”. These are set on the January page, and all the pages in the calendar display these headings.
You can override these headings on individual pages by simply selecting a cell and typing new text. If you delete the custom text, the default heading will re-appear.
Calendar Settings
Rather than resort to Shape Data fields, or creating an add-in that requires installation, I’ve used Visio SmartShapes to “graphically” tweak the options and appearance of the calendar.
The first page in the document has a bunch of these “settings shapes” that allow you to change options and formatting for the calendar. These include:
- Page size: letter, legal, tabloid, A4, A3
- Number of planning columns
- Week-divisions starting on Sunday or Monday
- Font for all calendar-related shapes
- Fill and text color for month headers
- Line, fill, and text color for weekdays, weekends, and holidays
- Line color and weight for week divider
- Configurable list of holidays and special days for the year
If you zoom out to view the entire page of January, you should be able to see the SETTINGS shapes off the page in the left margin:
Tip: to quickly view-fit a whole page in a Visio window: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + W. (Be careful, as [Ctrl] + W will close the document!). See more shortcuts at: Work Faster With Our Top Visio Keyboard Shortcuts.
There are three flavors of controls: radio buttons, formatting blocks, and a text-list.
Double-click “Radio” Buttons
The circles that are either gray or blue are meant to be radio buttons. Only one of the buttons can be “checked” at a time. To select an option, you need to DOUBLE-click a shape! The bright blue shape is the selected option.
For the planning calendar, you can change the page size, the number of columns, and the week’s start day:
Double-click radio button shapes to set the value
Note that you can change the page size with a simple double-click of a button. The download (probably) is configured as a metric/A4 page size. U.S. people will want to click Letter when they first open the document!
I’ve done my best to ensure that all the required page settings are updated when you change the page size, but I am still not 100% confident that everything will be set up perfectly for printing. Be sure to check Print Preview if you do go to print these out. You may need to tweak the Page Setup > Print Setup > Printer paper setting. These settings are easily reached by right-clicking on page tabs.
Format Controls
With format-controlling shapes, you use Visio’s formatting controls to change the look of the box. These changes, in turn, get pushed to the document’s overall settings, so that all applicable shapes change their appearance.
For this calendar, you can generally alter the overall font, plus line, fill, and text colors.
This is what the formatting control shapes look like after the crazy person mentioned above got a hold of them:
Click on a formatting block, and change the line, fill, or text color using Visio’s built-in color buttons.
Remember again that narrower fonts work best if you decide to change Overall Font Face, since I didn’t account for wide day labels in my calculations.
Holiday List
The holiday list allows you to quickly add holidays to the year by typing text. The intelligence built in to the document can parse this list and highlight the appropriate day rows in the appropriate months.
Simply double-click the Holidays List shape to edit the existing text. You need to type [month.day] between square brackets, then hit TAB and type in the name of the holiday. For example:
[01.01] New Year’s Day
[07.04] Independence Day
[12.13] Taylor Swift’s Birthday
[12.25] Christmas Day
I originally had it as [year.month.day] but removed the year, so that there is the possibility that the calendar might be more easily used in future years.
This is definitely a case where having the month listed before the day makes much more sense, and is visually easier to parse. (I didn’t do this to force U.S. date format down everyone’s throat!) But there is no need to put the holidays in order. They will be correctly found and displayed in the calendar, as long as the text is formatted correctly!
For convenience, I’ve provided a list of Germany/DE holidays to the left of the Holidays List control. If you happen to live in Germany, you can double-click this shape to select the text, then copy and paste it over the default holidays.
Notes Block Shapes
I’ve provided a two “notes” shapes: Notes Block and Day Block. These shapes are useful for:
- Overriding the formatting of a day cell
- Highlighting an area of multiple days and columns
- Adding a note that applies to multiple days and columns
These shapes are located in calendar’s Document Stencil. You can find it by visiting More Shapes > My Shapes > Show Document Stencil.
They are basically the same shape, but Day Block is set up to be the size of one single day-cell, so you don’t have to futz around with it.
The shapes are constructed such that they snap to day-cell locations automatically.
Below, I’ve added the Day Block “PUSH-UPS!” and the Notes Block “Recover Days”.
Since the blocks are transparent by default, you might need to tweak the transparency to 0% to fully obscure the shading/formatting of the underlying day-cell. Just press F3 to bring up the formatting panel!
Here’s an animation of the Notes Block magically snapping to the page grid!
Caveats
You can’t have different numbers of columns on different pages. Of course, you could make a copy of the document, setup a different column count, then print individual months.
You can’t change the formatting of day-cell text very easily. The “global” settings on page 1 govern the look, for the most part. But you can drop a Notes Block or Day Block shape over any day, and block-out the underlying cell.
Use a narrower fonts to avoid text wrapping in the day label cells:
Hopefully I can fix this and update the download.
Check Print Preview before committing to hard copy. I’m not 100% sure that my page-size radio buttons totally prepare the calendar for full-page printing.
Calendar Week/Kalendarwoche numbers are always visible. There’s no option to show/hide these numbers-in-circles. Nerds will love the feature, curious folks will find it amusing. The rest can ignore them…hopefully.
I believe that regional settings on your machine will be picked up by Visio and by my design. So, for example, German users should see Januar Februar März April etc., und Mo Di Mi Do etc. I’ve just tried it in Windows 11 and the diagram updated live when I switched the region to German, Ukrainian, and back to U.S. English. Pretty cool!
Notes Block shapes will change position if you change the page size after adding notes. They don’t remember which row, column they “belong” to, they simply snap to matching sizes.
Download “Monthly Planner Calendar 2025” s!Aj0wJuswNyXljTUx3LTh-7ZZvRIz – Downloaded 45 times –
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