Helen's calendar for 2008 year

What calendar is perfect for me? It's a calendar made by me. I decided to try Calendar Wizard software to make my own calendar in the way I want. I needed two calendars - one of them for the next year, big and good-looking, another one - the simplest calendar for the next month. And this is my impressions of first attempts of making a calendar with Calendar Wizard 3.0.

Having entered the program, I saw dialog window, which looks like window you see while installing software on your computer. The window has Next and Back buttons, and program is based on step-by-step principle. It is the first advantage I've noted. Step-by-step calendar making is rather convenient for me. Each step is a group of related parameters, and such structure of program makes calendar creation easy even for me though I'm not an advanced computer user at all. The next thing I liked very much is interactive preview, which enables user to see changes in calendar look immediately after specifying any parameter. So, it's time to start the first calendar making.

Step 1

The first you should do is to choose interface language. Then, choose whether you want to create calendar from existing calendar template file (these templates are in the Sample folder, and you can also create your own templates) or start new project. The next is to choose calendar period: for the whole year or only for one month and choose a year or month respectively. My first calendar was for the next (2008) year, so I chose the whole year.

Step 2

Enter the calendar header. You can enter anything you want as a header; it's limited only with your imagination and your calendar size. My header was Happy New 2008 Year of the Rat (Mouse). From Helen with love. How did I know 2008 year will be the year of the Rat? Calendar Wizard has "Add Chinese zodiac year name" option, so I hadn't to search for this information in the Web. I liked this option very much. The last is to choose months layout - how many rows and columns will have the calendar (I've chosen four columns (4x3) - below I will put my choice into brackets).

Step 3

Month's structure. You can select week orientation - weeks in columns or in rows (rows). Weeks numbering can be added to the calendar (tick off). You can set quantity of weeks in one row or column - 1 week, 2 weeks or all weeks (1 week). Select the first day of week - any day can be set as week starting point, not only Sunday or Monday.
You can see a sample of month appearance while specifying month's structure.

Step 4

Choose months' and weekdays' names (one can choose language of the names and there can be names in more than one language at one time. Language can be chosen by pressing Clear and Add buttons - Clear to remove existing names and Add to insert names in needed language. You can repeat Add procedure until titles in all languages you want are added. Default language of titles is your system language. Tick off Short names to get abbreviated titles , if you don't tick it off, you will have full titles . One can also choose letter case for months' and weekdays' names - all capital, all lowercase or lowercase starting with capital. Take into account that you can change letter case only after clearing existing names . For example, I had all capital letters for months' names and all lowercase for weekdays. And I wanted to have names starting with capital. So, I cleared months' names (pressed Clear button), chose an appropriate letter case and then pressed Add and chose names language. The same procedure was made for weekdays' names . As you can see, letter case can be selected separately for months' and weekdays' names . Short names can also be applied separately to months' or weekdays' names . One can also add year to a month's name in two forms - full year number (e.g. 2008) and brief number (e.g. 08), or choose empty not to add year.) I've added short months' and weekdays' names in English and Russian ( names in different languages are separated with slash). What's interesting - you can enter whatever name you want. So, if Sunday, Monday etc. are too boring for you, you can enter "Weekend is over" instead of Monday, "I can't work anymore " instead of Friday and so on.

Step 5

Choose the location of weekdays' and month's names . The calendar can have one row\column of weekdays' names above or beneath a group of months or have the names above each month. Month's name can be arranged above a month or at the left of a month (I've set weekdays' names above each month and month's name above a month ).

Step 6

Concern the possibilities to save space by adjoining single day of the first or last week (if they are Sunday or Monday respectively) with the next or the previous week; to fill the gap in the first or last week with days of the previous or the next month for your convenience; and to show month's gridlines .

Step 7

If you've chosen to show month's gridlines (as I've done), your 7 th step is at first to determine cell size. One can choose cell size corresponding to the text size ( “In the text” option ). But I've chosen Selected cell size. After choosing Selected there appeared Width and Height values and selection of text alignment inside a cell. Then, I wanted to show gridline borders and ticked it off, after what I could adjust border width and color . Lines color (as well as text or background colors in the next steps) can be set manually by adjusting color values in CMYK or RGB models. But the easiest way to choose needed color is to click color box and select color using color palette. Cell color will be selected in the next step.

Step 8

(step number will vary depending on whether you've chosen to show month's gridlines or not - see step 6 )

This step is to specify the parameters of days and titles. There are categories of days and titles in the left window. Having clicked the needed category, one can specify its parameters, such as text parameters (font, size, color), background color, and text orientation. So, I've chosen different fonts for titles and dates. Then, I used background colors to mark out Saturdays and Sundays (one can choose different parameters for Saturday and Sunday). Mind you, if you didn't choose to show month's gridlines , you wouldn't be able to set color background for date cells, year title , months' and weekdays' names . The thing I should mention - names of Saturday and Sunday takes the color of Saturday and Sunday dates. It is important if your dates color is identical with background color for weekdays' names . In this case your "Saturday" and "Sunday" will merge with background and become invisible. One more advice - don't mix up white background with transparent background, they look identically in preview.

There is the Dates category. You can make your own list of important dates or edit existing one. These days have their own parameters, so, if you want, you can make them differ from other days using another font style, font size, text or background colors.

I must say, I liked this step very much, because it was very interesting for me to amuse myself changing my calendar's appearance and palette with some mouse-clicks. When I became tired of playing with fonts and colors, I went to the next step.

Step 9

I was offered to save my layout parameters for further use. I agreed and saved calendar template (.cbl file), which can be used in future for making other calendars.

Step 10

One can select file format to build the calendar. Available plug-ins are: Adobe Flash , Adobe PDF, HTML-file , JPEG image, Metafile Windows , MS Excel, OLE Automation for CorelDraw and text format. After selecting a format, the next step is…

Step 11

…file building. It's different for each file format. What's pleasant - you can return to the previous step as many times as you want, so you can make files of all needed formats without opening program one more time.

So, the first calendar is ready. Making the second calendar (for one month), I saw there is no difference between a year and a month calendar except eliminating Step 2 and year titles in step 7. Having learned all features of calendar Wizard during the first calendar making, I made the second calendar within 10 minutes.

Let's sum up my experience. It's necessary to say about

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