*Create Your Own* FREE Blank Calendar

I get a lot of hits from people looking for free calendars. I have given out many links to printable calendar templates over the year and a half that I've been blogging. I am a calendar and list junkie. That makes it all the more ironic that I never really began using MS Outlook's task and calendar functions. Recently I have decided to give it a try.

If you have a copy of MS Office, you can easily set up your Outlook mail program to keep track of email contact's birthdays (if you enter their birthday in the contact area, it will automatically update your calendar with it). You can use Outlook to keep track of addresses for contacts, tasks you need to get done (complete with reminders and the option of making them reoccurring), all of your important appointments, schedule items (homeschool schedule?!), and even a journal!

I recently discovered that you can print your own day planner pages from Outlook as well. You can print them WITH your information or you can print a blank calendar - it is all up to you!

Here are the instructions I discovered online for printing a blank calendar:

You can quickly print a blank calendar in Outlook using the steps below:

Within Outlook, click the File menu, point to New, and click Folder.
Type in a name for the folder.
Click Calendar Items from the Folder contains list.
Click Calendar under Select where to place the folder.
Click OK.
Highlight your new folder from the Folder list.
From the File menu, click Print.
Under the Print Style, select the type of calendar you want to print.
Select the start and end date under the Print range.
Click OK.

To print your marked calendar (already has scheduled tasks and appointments), you would simply do the following:

Click your Calendar menu within Outlook in the left sidebar
Click File, and Print.
A box will pop up allowing you to choose the style of your calendar and it will allow you to pick what dates to print, how many copies you want to print, how you want the pages collated, and more.
If you select the Page Setup button on this box, you can further choose the layout, the times you want on your day, if you want 1 or 2 pages per day/week/month, the font and shading, etc.
You can also preview the page if you click Print Preview in this view.
It allows you to select a header and footer as well - and you can include your tasks and notes by just clicking a button.

In the end, you are able to print a highly customized day planner page with your tasks, birthdays, holidays and appointments already written out for you. How cool is that?!?!?

Now if I could get my copy to print the active tasks instead of those already crossed off... it would be perfect. I'm still working on that bug, and downloaded the free Windows Office 2007 Calendar Assistant... so I'll come back in and give you a preview of my calendar page once I get it ironed out!


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