How to Make a Calendar in Microsoft Excel

The grid format of a spreadsheet makes it easy to make a calendar in Excel. Unlike a store-bought calendar, your spreadsheet-based calendar is easy to customize and keep up to date.

Roll Your Own: Make A Calendar In Excel
Since a calendar is just an array of boxes, making one in Excel is pretty straightforward. The following steps will show you how to make your own calendar:

• Open a new workbook by clicking File, New in the menu and selecting the Workbook template.
• In the cell A1, enter the month. "April, 2009" for example.
• In cells A2 to G2, enter the days of the week.
• Look up the first day of the month and enter a "1" in the corresponding cell below the days of the week. For example, in April 2009, the first day of the month is a Wednesday. So you would enter a "1" in cell D3.
• For the first seven days of the month, enter values into the corresponding cells. In the April 2009 example, you'd end up with a "7" in cell C4.
• In the cell below the "1" (D4 in our example) input the equation: =(D3+7). You'll see that the cell is populated with the value "8".
• Copy the cell with the formula (D4 in our example) using the CRTL+C key combination.
• Select the next day cell in the calendar and paste the formula using the CRTL+V key combination.
• Repeat the paste operation for the remaining days of the month.

Once you've created you calendar, you can format it to meet your needs. Cells can be formatted by selecting the cell and clicking Format, Cells in the menu. The cell formatting dialog box will allow you to make many changes to the cell, including font, color, borders and alignment.

The Easy Way Out
If the idea of creating your own calendar isn't appealing, you can use a Microsoft Excel template to simplify the process. The Microsoft Office Web site has many downloadable calendar templates and you can find many third-party templates with a quick search of the Web.