A calendar may seem a simple object at first, unworthy of much attention but a little reflection leads us to think otherwise. Calendars are very useful and are often found on walls or notice boards in kitchens or studies, at home or in offices. They are very useful for recording events like birthdays, appointments and parties in advance and for scheduling things like holidays and building or decorating. They often record national holidays and religious festivals and usually have a decorative element as well.
Your task will be to create a calendar of your own design that is suitable for use at home. You could try searching the internet for a calendar that you can download or print for yourself but you are unlikely to find exactly what you are looking for. The topics or themes your calendar might feature include:
sport, landscape, flowers, plants, animals, vehicles, aeroplanes, food, countries, buildings, people, paintings, sculptures - almost anything!
Calendars in Publisher can be produced either from an existing template or by designing a template of your own from scratch. This example will introduce many more basic techniques, building on the programme.
As usual Publisher provides a wide range of templates on which to base your own calendar. To use a template choose File/New and click on Publications For Print. Choose Calendars from the list and then browse through the available designs for one that you like.
You will discover that each calendar has only one month and you will have to add the other eleven. To do this choose Insert/Pages and enter 11 as the number of pages to add. You will now have to work your way through the 11 pages and change the elements on each page - the name of the month and the position of the days within the grid.
You will almost certainly find it more rewarding to create your own calendar so browse through the ones provided for ideas and inspiration and then proceed to the next section.
Start a new file and choose Blank Publications from the list of options. Choose File/Page Setup and select the page orientation that you want to use (portrait or landscape) and the page size (A4 or A3). You should choose A4 as the default as A3 will require a heavier paper or card to prevent it from drooping. A3 will also be more expensive to produce, not just for printing but also for binding and/or laminating and it will also take more design effort and experience.
If you are going to include a picture on each page you need to find a suitable set of images. These images could be quite small, leaving the main area of the page for the grid of weeks and days, or they could be quite large with a smaller grid underneath. Another option is to use a full-page illustration and place the grid over the top, though this can be quite tricky to pull off successfully as variations in colour across the image can make it hard to read the letters over the top.
Title
We could use master pages to add elements that will appear on every page but there is no need to introduce this level of sophistication as we will later use copy and paste. For now, therefore, we will simply add to the first page any elements that we want to appear on every page such as the title of the calendar and pictures or logos.
Month
Start with the month name. Place a text box under your title and enter the name of the month and the year. Select the text and format it as you want it - size, bold, colour, centred, etc. If you want to add a picture drag the left or right border to a marker (if you didn't include a vertical marker for this purpose switch to Master Pages and do it now).
To make the text fit the space available use font size and also Format/Character Spacing.
Images
Adjust the text box to suit the text format you have chosen and add a picture box to the right. When you click on the picture box icon you have a choice of Clip Art, Picture from File, Empty Picture Frame or From Scanner/Camera. Choose the option appropriate to your situation. If you are pasting from another application choose Empty Picture Frame.
Table For Days
The table for the days is the most important object on the calendar and you should put a lot of your effort into getting this right.
Add your table under the month name. Click on the Table icon in the toolbox and drag out the table between the guides. You will need 7 columns, one for each day, and 7 rows, one for the day names and 6 for the weeks/days.
Enter the day names in the top row of the table and then drag across them to format them - size, font, centred, colour, bold, etc. The cells for the names of the days do not need to be very deep so drag the bottom border upwards to make them smaller.
Enter the numbers for the days of the month (find the starting point in January and then type in the remaining 364). Format the numbers as you want (something close to the letters but not necessarily the same).
To format the table right click it and choose Format Table from the popup menu. This will format an individual cell. To format the horizontal lines turn off the vertical lines by clicking on their buttons on the right of the box. Now set the weight of the line and its colour.
Repeat this for the vertical lines (making them different thicknesses is a nice effect but leave the colour the same).
You can now use the format painter to copy the format from the formatted cell to the rest of the table. Move the mouse inside the formatted cell until you see a north-east pointing arrow and then click to select the cell. Click on the Format Painter (brush) in the toolbar and then drag across all the cells in the table.
To give cells a different shade select one or more cells and click on the Fill Colour (bucket) tool. Choose More Fill Colours for the full range of available colours.
Add whatever additional elements you want under the days grid, such as an address box, a list of phone numbers, a miniature grid of the next month, etc.
Here is the finished design for January:
Note the use of three horizontal guides to position the month banner, the calendar grid and the bottom section. The bottom section here has been used for useful phone numbers, a blank area for notes and a miniature grid for the next month - other designs are possible. The font used here is Century Gothic.
To complete the calendar we now need to add 11 new pages - Insert/Pages/11. This opens the following dialogue:
Select the option to Duplicate all objects on page 1 and you will have 11 new pages that are a copy of the first.
Now you must change the month name on each page, the dates for each month and the picture if you wish. Adding the days of the year is tedious but it takes less time than you might think. To remove the current numbers select the cells of the grid and press the delete key.
You should attach text to certain days to mark events such as religious festivals, public holidays, significant events such as sports and cultural, family birthdays and family holidays. The school calendar, for example, includes festival dates for the major religions.
To add items to a box for a particular day choose the Text Box tool and add a text box over the day. Enter the text and then format it and re-size the text. There is a list of religious festivals for 2005 at: BBC Schools. Sporting events can be found at Sunday Times (football, cricket, rugby, golf, tennis, motor racing...). For dates of other events try a search engine.
