Now that you’ve got your template page set up, let’s make it look nice!

If you zoom out to look at the whole page

you’ll notice that there’s a lot of blank space. There’s also not much space to add in the holidays and special events that we’ll want on our calendar:

There are a couple of ways of filling your page. I like to leave the rows with the numbers a little shallower than the box below where I add holidays and special events.

I like to select just the rows with the empty boxes. You can click on a row number, then hold CTRL on your keyboard and click another row to select multiple rows. In my example, I’m selecting the odd rows, starting with row 3:

Then, I go between row 13 and row 14 and pull down A TINY BIT. This will expand all of those rows, so don’t pull far because that additional space adds up very quickly!

If you pull too far, you’ll stretch your calendar onto another page:

If you go too far, just pull the bottom of the last row selected up until it all fits on one page

 

If you prefer, you could expand the number rows as well. I don’t like it quite as much myself, but it is a little easier.

You could select row 2 and then drag down to row 13 or Shift + click on 13 to select all of your rows

Again, make sure you don’t pull too far or it will go onto another page:

I just noticed that I don’t really like the look of my numbers. I want to add some shading and a border around both cells that represent one day.

I centred the number and shaded in that box with a different colour. Then I selected both cells (shift and click or shift and drag down) and added Outside Borders:

I’m lazy. I don’t want to have to do that for all 42 days. Once you have something formatted the way you like, you can copy the formatting options and apply them elsewhere. Start by selecting whatever you want to copy the formatting from:

On your top toolbar, you’ll see a paintbrush. It’s called the Format Painter. Double click that to pick up the formatting:

When you copy something, you’ll see a dotted line dancing around the cell you’re copying:

Then you just go Paint those formatting options onto your other cells:

You’ll have to click that paint brush tool between rows, but once you’ve copied the formatting, you can apply it wherever you like

For me, that looks much better.

You could, at this point, also add Pictures or Illustrations if you wish. I’ll do that later so they aren’t the same on every month, but if you want to, you could go into the Insert menu and look at your options there:

Remember to use high quality images, such as the ones you can get from Unsplash. I like to find photos on Unsplash or elsewhere, download them onto my computer, then go into the Insert menu and add them to my page