Making a whole calendar from scratch sounds pretty tedious and demanding or like a fool’s errand, doesn’t it? Do you have to make a grid? Count the days? Make sure that this year isn’t a leap year? Don’t you also have to take note what day of the week it is as well as the day of the month?
Actually, if you know how to make a calendar in google sheets, it ends up being pretty easy to do. Google Sheets makes the whole thing automatic, after all.
Why Make a Calendar in Google Sheets?
Sure, you can easily download a ready-made calendar template, open PDFs for 2022 calendars, or buy a real calendar. However, a spreadsheet calendar is something you can edit and use for your schedules. Also, it’s fun being able to build things yourself, including a calendar.
You can also create individual Google Sheets calendars to send to clients to outline your schedule or showcase your deadlines for the week, month, season, or year. The main appeal of this calendar type is that it’s fully functional and can be shared by anyone with a Google account.
The Google Sheet calendar can also be used as your company’s internal shareable calendar that can be edited to post updates, reminders for tasks, deadlines, and more.
How to Make a Calendar in Google Sheets
Step 1: Open a new spreadsheet you intend to turn into a calendar.
Step 2: Press Ctrl + A or the upper-left pane right where the row numbers and column letters meet. This will select all the cells. This also enables you to edit all cell sizes by adjusting just one cell.
The changes on one cell should then reflect on all the selected cells. This way, you won’t have to manually edit every cell, every row, or every column.
Step 3: Add the names of the days on the second row. It’s okay that they’re in huge boxes for now. We can edit it out later. Start from Sunday then end in Saturday (Sunday is actually the first day of the week).
Step 4: You can do some aesthetic flairs and flourishes at this point. I personally decided to make the week row of my calendar into an orange color.
I’ve also decided to change the font color to white so that the days could better complement or pop in the orange background.
Go to the alignment button and change the text alignment to center.
Finally, resize the row to fit the size of the words.
Step 5: Merge the cells together in Row 1.
Put in the “January 2022” on Row 1 then put it in center alignment.
Incidentally, my spreadsheet’s formula bar auto-formatted “January 2022” to “1/1/2022”, which is just wrong. You can change it back to plain text by going to the “Data” menu, “Number”, and “Plain text”.
The finished product should look like this.
Step 6: Fill in the numbers on the rest of the cells as so.
Add empty rows below the numbers then resize the cells with the numbers so they’d appear on the upper-right corner of the box. Also, put the numbers in Bold.
Gray out the rest of the cells by selecting them, doing the right-click, and selecting “Hide cells”.
Meanwhile, delete the remaining rows for good measure. This will leave the cells you’re using for your calendar as the only ones visible on the spreadsheet. It makes for a cleaner design too.
Step 7: You should end up with a complete calendar like so. You can also use other formatting options if you wish for another look for your calendar.
Use that as a template for the other months of the year. Do the rest of the months from February to December until you have a full calendar.
You can also add flourishes like symbols and icons for the holidays. For example, I put a picture of a Christmas tree on December 25 to indicate that it’s Christmas Day.
Getting into the Nitty-Gritty
In order to make a calendar in Google Sheets, you need to first start by formatting your calendar. From there, use a formula to fill in the days of the week of every month. Fill in the rest of the numbers then reformat the calendar as necessary from January to December.
Afterwards, it all becomes a matter of adding design elements and your own personal aesthetic touch to your new electronic spreadsheet calendar.
References:
- Learn Google Spreadsheets, “Google Sheets – Calendar Template“, YouTube, October 5, 2021
- Deanna Ritchie, “How to Create a Calendar in Google Sheets“, Calendar.com, November 18, 2019
- CalgaryBen, “How to Create a Dynamic Monthly Calendar in Google Sheets – Template Provided“, YouTube, February 19, 2019
- Kayla Carmicheal, “How to (Easily) Make Perfect Content Calendars in Google Sheets,” Hubspot.com Blog, Retrieved June 21, 2022