How to make a calendar to print

Making a printable calendar is quick in Publish by Zaweba. Choose the month calendar template, which is A4 landscape and set to the current month, or the year calendar template, which fits all twelve months on one A4 page. Add your own pictures and dates, then print it or export a PDF. The app is free and works offline.

There's also a third route, for when the calendar is only part of a page: Insert > Page parts includes a calendar for this month that you can drop onto a newsletter or a noticeboard poster.

Which kind of calendar you need

A month calendar is the one for a kitchen wall or a club noticeboard, where each day needs a bit of room for writing. The template uses an A4 landscape page, which gives wide day boxes and room for a picture or a heading.

A year calendar is a planner at a glance. All twelve months sit on one A4 page, so it's good for school term dates, bin collection days or a club's fixtures for the season.

The calendar page part is smaller and meant to sit alongside other content. A church newsletter might have a calendar of this month's services in a sidebar, for example. Page parts arrive centred in the margins, grouped, and coloured with the document's own colours.

Making it yours

Once the template is open, add a picture. Insert, paste or drag one in, then double-click it to crop inside the frame so the best part shows. Picture adjustments can recolour it to greyscale or sepia if you want something quieter that doesn't fight with the numbers.

Mark the important days. You can type notes onto the page, change a shape's fill colour for a holiday, or add a small shape such as a star over a date. Keep marks consistent, one colour for school holidays and another for birthdays, say, so the calendar reads at a glance.

If you want the whole calendar in different colours, the Format menu's colour schemes restyle everything that uses the document colours in one step. Font schemes do the same for the heading and body styles.

Making a set of twelve

For a calendar with one page per month, start from the month template and add pages. A master page can carry anything that should be on every page, such as a footer with the club's name. Master pages also handle page numbers if you want them.

Each page then needs its own month's dates and its own picture. Work through them one at a time, checking that the first day of each month falls on the right weekday.

Printing and binding

Print through the Windows print dialog. Publish prints at actual size and centred, scaling down only if the paper is smaller than the page. Export PDF and Export pictures both accept page ranges, so you can export a single month or a quarter such as 1-3 from a twelve-page file.

For a print shop, export the print-ready PDF with bleed and crop marks. For sharing on a website or a club's social page, export each page as a PNG or JPEG at 150 or 300 dpi.

Spend a minute proofreading the dates before you print. A calendar with a wrong day is worse than no calendar, and it's the one mistake everyone will notice.