Personalize a calendar for New Year in Publisher

Here we are just days away from New Year’s Day, and that means we need new calendars. As many of you know, Publisher makes quick work of creating personalized calendars. In this post I show how to make a new calendar or update an old one in Publisher 2010 and 2007. (This also works in Publisher 2003.)

The quickest way to start is to find and adapt a calendar template that’s close to what you want. You can choose from the 2011 calendar templates for Publisher. However, these templates are written specifically for calendar year 2011 and in a year you won’t be able to easily update your 2011 calendar for 2012. If you want to be able to re-use your calendar next year, I suggest that you start with one of the calendar templates that are installed with Publisher. When you open Publisher you are shown a catalog of templates to choose from to create a new publication. The catalog is divided by category, such as Calendars, and whether the templates are installed on your computer or available to be downloaded from Office.com. For calendars, the Office.com templates tend to be designed for specific years, while the Installed Templates are not specific and can be configured for the year or specific months within the year.

Create a new calendar from a built-in Publisher template

As you can see from this screenshot from Publisher 2010, this Accent Box calendar template, like the other installed calendar templates, allows you to set the dates and layout for your calendar. This means that next year you can update your calendar just by changing the date.

Note: The same sequence works in Publisher 2007 and 2003. The equivalent screenshot from Publisher 2007 is in the next section.

Update an existing Publisher template for the new year

What if you already have a calendar for 2010 and you want to update it for 2011? That depends on what kind of template you used to create your 2010 calendar. Check to see if your template can be updated to the new year by changing templates. If your template can be updated, then you will see the Timeframe option, as shown above for Publisher 2010 and below for Publisher 2007. If you don’t see that option, you’ll need to change to another calendar template that supports this option.

Simply click the Set Calendar Dates button..

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And change the dates to the dates you want…

When you click OK, you will be asked if you want to create a new publication or apply the changes to your current publication…

Choose to create a new publication to create your calendar for 2011. Be sure to look through the new calendar for text that might be left over from your old calendar, for instance some captions won’t automatically change to the correct months and will need you to change them by hand.

— Bob deLaubenfels