What is a custom calendar in MS Excel and how can we create that?

Versatility is one of the best features of the products within MS Excel as we can easily enter detailed spreadsheets and tables within Excel. Depending on our various projects needs, we can integrate tables and …

Versatility is one of the best features of the products within MS Excel as we can easily enter detailed spreadsheets and tables within Excel. Depending on our various projects needs, we can integrate tables and text in either program. Microsoft Excel even has the capability of duplicating both PowerPoint and publisher functions. But this remarkable flexibility offers you a number of options when it comes to MS excel editable calendar.

No matter which office 365 product you are using, you can create a calendar template most comfortably. Ms excel has a variety of calendars available. You can easily create a custom calendar by selecting an online template from “Calendar Template 2021”.The layout work will be already done for you and you can simply create your calendar just by adding your customization. Before knowing how to create a calendar in MS excel, let us discuss a bit in detail what a custom calendar is.

What is a calendar in MS Excel?

A customized calendar in MS Excel is like any other calendar. It can be used as a daily planner, weekly planner, and task planner. One can also create a printable calendar from it. The project management team often creates project calendars in MS Excel for tracking tasks and resources.

Maintaining a calendar is very essential and it can actually help you for handling tasks. Suppose you are out on a small vacation and relaxing on a Sunday afternoon, and it is quite common that the thought of arranging Monday’s tasks will haunt you. But you can plan your week or month ahead if you use a calendar and stop stressing yourself.

There are a number of excel calendar templates available and you can create any type of customized calendar suiting your needs. Just type “Create a calendar in excel” and search in Google and you will yourself get to know what we are talking about.

Some ways to create an Excel Calendar:-

  • You can use Microsoft’s “Visual basics for applications” code for creating a calendar.
  • You can use Power Query for creating a calendar, which is an MS Excel add-in and it uses pre-built functions for merging, pivoting, and removing rows and columns.
  • You can create an Excel calendar by using pivot tables that summarize the data of another table.
  • You use Excel calendar templates for creating your own customized calendar
  • You can also create an Excel calendar manually by formatting excel data in rows and columns.

Steps for creating a calendar in Excel manually:-

Follow this to create a fillable calendar in Excel manually:

STEP 1: Adding the days in a week:-

First, open a fresh Excel file and name it the year you want.

For example, we are naming our calendar as “Calendar 2021” The in the second row of the Excel sheet you will have to enter the days of a week.

STEP 2: Format cells for creating days in a month:-

Now enter the days of a month under the row which contains the weekdays. The days will be placed in the calendar table in grid format, consisting of seven columns and six rows.

Let us start with the column width for formatting the cells: Forgiving the same size to all the columns, select the seven columns at once, and adjust the width of the first column as per your preference. Automatically all seven columns will take the same size.

Now we will learn how to adjust the row height with a similar process. You will first have to select all the six rows under the “days of the week” row and set the first row’s height as per your preference. Just like the previous process, all the rows will automatically take the same height.

After this step, it will automatically look like a calendar. Add the digits for the days in the next step and then gradually join them to each cell’s upper right corner representing a day. For doing that you need to highlight the grid of six rows and seven columns under the weekday header. Then right-click on any selected cell.

Next select, Format Cells>Alignment  You will have to adjust the horizontal text alignment to the right and the vertical text alignment to the top. After that click on “OK” and the cell will get aligned.

Next, you will have to insert the number in the cells. For reference, you can take the help of your mobile calendar or Google calendar 2021. This will help you to find the day of the week when you should start your calendar. Sequentially enter the numbers till you reach the last day of the month.

Since it is the August calendar, name it so. First, highlight the cells in the very first row and click on “Merge and Center”.Then type “August” in the merged cell and your first month is ready. Lastly, change the font color and size according to your preference.

STEP 3: Create the next month:-

There are 12 months in a year and you need to create 11 tabs, each representing a single month in your Excel workbook. Copy the August worksheet to create the September one. For doing that right click on the August tab and select “move”.

When the “Move” dialogue box will appear, select move to end > check off  Create a copy>Click ok

Then Ms. Excel will create a new calendar sheet for you, the same as the “August” one. Then rename the sheet as “September” then edit the sheet accordingly.

STEP:4 Exactly repeat the same process for other months:-

You will need to repeat the above-mentioned steps for creating an Excel calendar for the rest of the months. You will just have to use the knowledge in the same way.

3 Excel Calendar Templates:-

There are various free calendar templates available on the web, but here we will take a look at the three free excel calendar templates that you can use. In these templates, you will get a blank calendar 2021 and have to fill it accordingly.

  1. Weekly Calendar Templates are very useful to note down your task for each day.
  2. Weekly Schedule Planner Templates are useful for jotting down the plan of your week ahead to stay organized.
  3. Project Calendar Templates are used for basic project management. You can view projects, meetings, and deadlines easily.

So we can conclude that an Excel calendar helps a lot to stay organized just like a regular calendar. Any business will need an Excel calendar for scheduling tasks and meetings and sending reminders.