Calendar Making with MS Word 2002 Windows 7 is different!

Open Word. Click on File / New.

A New Document menu opens. Click on New from Templates/General Templates.

In the Templates window, select tab Other Documents, then Calendar Wizard. Make sure the radio button Template is selected. Click OK.

And the Wizard opens. You can select the step where you want to start, but it automatically opens at the Start point. Click on Next

The wizard changes to the Style selection. There are only three styles to choose from here, but there are more on the web. Click Next.

The Direction and Picture selection pane appears. In this case, I’ve chosen Landscape and Yes to Do you want to leave room for a picture. Click Next.

The Starting and Ending pane appears. I like to send a 13 month calendar, so I select January next year to January two years hence. Click on Next.

Click on Finish.

And the first month of your calendar appears. The picture space is taken up by a place-keeping graphic.

Now comes the tricky bit! The calendar is based on frames and tables. Each of the four parts– graphic, month, year, and table - is contained in its own frame. The table contains the weekdays and dates, one item per cell. If you can manipulate graphics and tables, you are ahead! To start, we’ll insert the picture.

Copy your chosen picture (I chose a pic from My Pictures. And no, it is not me swinging the club) and click anywhere in the graphic, and it is selected. Then paste your pic, and hey presto, there it is!

You can add a caption to the graphic, as I have.

Frames can be resized, moved, rotated (but the contents remain as is).

The year, dates table, and months are all in separate frames, so can be manipulated separately, as below.

Which doesn’t look good, but read on…. The calendar is a table, so has all the table attributes, and can be altered to suit your taste.

Here I’ve selected the whole table by putting my insertion point in a cell, then selecting Table/ Select/Table. I now change the font size by clicking on the font size box, and selecting another size, in this case 22 (it was 36)

With the table still selected, I’m ready to put in borders. Click on Format/Borders and Shading.

The Borders and Shading pane appears, where I can select different attributes of borders. I’ve chosen a dotted line style, line thickness of ¾, and decided to have borders around all the cells in the table.

So it looks like this: Font 22, all cells bordered with dotted lines.

But wait, there is more! I want to change the position of the dates so there is more room in the cell for hand-written notes.

To do this, I select the column, and move the Left Indent pointer to the left, so that the figure is closer to the edge of the cell. Notice that I have done this in columns 1 and 2. And will do it to the other columns.

I now want to alter the appearance of the January and 2012 text. I want to alter the background colour of January from black to say blue. Select Format/Borders and Shading, then the Shading tab.

Choose your colour from the palette. Click OK.

And the colour is changed.

How about the font colour, etc. Read On!

Select the frame, then the text to be changed, then click Format/Font. Click the down arrow-head in the Font Colour box, and choose your colour; and any other change you want to make to the font, and click OK.

And we have done the first month! Only 12 more to go on this calendar.

But it gets easier the more you do, I can assure you. Hints: Select your gallery of pictures for the calendar and put them in a separate folder, for ease of selection. Make a note of your settings for the first month, so you know what to choose for the rest.