Monday 28 November 2011

Make your own diary - source files

Last week I wrote about making your own diary layout if you couldn't find one commercially available that you liked. I also made available a PDF file of my 2012 layout.

Today, I am making available the source files so the more geeky of you can have a play. You'll need this excel file which does all the hard work. You can adapt this to give you any date range you want; simply change the dates in the first column. Have a look at the formulae, which mostly extract elements from the date and are relatively simple. Over towards the right, though, where dates are calculated for the mini calendars, there are some more complex formulae. Importantly, these columns must stay formatted as text, even though the data are numerical in nature; otherwise Word can't cope with them properly.

Speaking of Word, you can also grab the layout template I merged the data into to make my layout. You can adapt this to produce pretty much any layout you could imagine, then merge into a document you can print and punch. A couple of words of warning, though (pun semi-intentional). Firstly, depending on what version of word you're using, Word may put section breaks between every record, which will throw out the mirrored gutter formatting in the format. If it does, the solution is quite simple; do a find and replace on section breaks (^b) to remove them all. You'll also need to add a single page break to the front of the merged document so that a 2-day spread has gutters in the middle. Of course, this isn't an issue on 1-page layouts. You might also need to adjust the top and bottom margins until print preview confines the layout properly to single pages for your printer.

That's it really. If you want to roll your sleeves up you can create the perfect layout that is unique to your own needs. And you need never pay for a diary insert again. Switching mid-year? No problem. Your pages can start and end on any date you like.

5 comments:

amanda said...

I have sworn off of printing my own pages anymore, as historically I've allowed it to consume far too much of my time! But, having attempted (and failed) at similarly ambitious projects, I felt like I should comment and give you big kudos on this awesome project. I hope many people can benefit from the hours that I know you've put into this!

Ray Blake said...

Thank you. That's kind of you.

Jen said...

Ray, I love all the hard work you and Steve have done on the pages. One question on this page. The calendar at the top of the second page isn't populating for me. Any suggestions?

Ray Blake said...

It isn't supposed to, Jen. It's just there as a shell to force the table cell to be the same size on the right page as on the left.

Trivedi's Know How said...

Great work indeed! Thanks for sharing your efforts...

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