Calendars

At the start of the new year I need to be ready with new calendars. A monthly wall calendar, a booklet planner, and an annual calendar for planning and project management.

Monthly Photo Wall Calendar

The monthly photo wall calendar is a staple in our house. Do it yourself with Big Huge Labs calendar creation. Firefox worked better than IE 8, not sure why but the photo upload javascript had problems in IE. Personalized is always the best and this picture from 2006 is an excellent reminder of a great vacation to Silver Sands in rural Jamaica on the north coast.

Generating these calendars requires uploading photo's or linking to photo's on Flickr or Facebook. Upload of large megapixel photos was a little slow, resizing first might help. (Resizr is quick and easy and allows cropping at the same time.)

Combining the calendar and the photo into 1 page works well. Another option would be to use the DIY Planner program (below) to print monthly calendars on 1 page and combine with a 1 page photo for a larger wall calendar.

Planner

DIY calendar creation for any purpose (daily, weekly, monthly, yearly) is easy at DIY Planner with the dynamic templates program. Requires the Blue Highway font (check out all of the fonts available at dafont.com ). In the process of getting this working, I installed PDF-XChange Viewer v.2.044 which is a great PDF reader! Additionally, it is also an excellent booklet printer. I generated calendars in 5.5 x 8.5 in. portrait pages in multiple passes: 2 pages per month and 1 page per year. I combined these files (and a couple of blank pages to get my multiple pages for the booklet configured as I wanted), using jPdfTweak. This open source utility is a slick way to merge, split, and reorder PDFs. Printing the 2 sided, 2 up booklets is fairly easy - just remember to reverse the pages (the top page on the printer from pass #1 goes to the bottom of the stack).

• 6/4/2011 update: PDF Bookbinder 3.0 may have some advantages for booklet printing.

Compact Calendar

The compact calendar (designed by David Seah) is a one page planner containing a complete annual calendar. This is a great tool for planning and managing projects. Working with any type of schedule is much easier with a big picture of the year. Because it is built in an Excel spreadsheet, you can modify at will!