Really Easy Calendar Printer

Every year I make a calendar with pictures of my daughter. None of the available programs or services had the features I wanted so, as with my envelope program, I wrote my own. In the spirit of the season (New Year’s, not Christmas) I’m making it available free for downloading.

Since my daughter was born in 1995, I’ve been making picture calendars of her for myself and for those relatives who care. The first couple of years, I had Staples’ copy center make them. But there were some features I wanted that they couldn’t provide. I found that online services (even those available today) didn’t provide them either. So back in 1998, I wrote my own program and I’ve been using it ever since. In addition to the minimum requirement of printing photos and calendar pages, it:

• Shows U.S. and Jewish holidays,
• Shows Daylight Saving Time changes
• Shows the major phases of the moon (helpful for stargazing and debugging computer programs),
• Allows you to define new holidays (e.g. birthdays) based on the Gregorian, Hebrew, or Easter calendars,
• Allows the holidays to have complex definitions (e.g. “the Tuesday after the first Monday in November”)
• Allows you to display pictures for holidays

That last feature is truly unique, and was the most important feature to me. I want a picture of the person to appear on his/her birthday.

You can see an example of a calendar page on the right. The pictures add character to an otherwise bland page. Of course, they also consume the space you would use to write your personal appointments, but that’s rarely been a problem for me.

If you would like to use my program to create your own calendars, you can download it and use it for free. It works on Windows XP, Vista, and 7. Unfortunately, it does not include the clip art I use for the holidays, since I don’t own the rights to that. But there’s lots of clip art available free on the web that you can use.

Download Calendar.zip