Web MouseTrax.com

Related Information...

• Learn more about modifying photos in this Computor Companion article written by Dian Chapman: Edit Digital Photos.
  
  
  
• Read more about creative photo projects in this TechTrax article: 3D Album.
  
  
  
• Learn how to create quick photo displays with Photo Story in this TechTrax article.
  
  
  
• Learn how to take your family photos to make cool holiday labels in this TechTrax article: Make Your Own Holiday Labels.
  
  
  
• You can use PowerPoint to create great photo albums. Learn how in this TechTrax article: PowerPoint Photo Album.
  
  
  
  
• Search out more helpful TechTrax articles through its Archives.
  
  
  
• Subscribe to TechTrax and don't miss another helpful article! Click the logo below to go to our subscription page. It's free!

A Labor of Love

by Dian D. Chapman

Create a Personalize Calendar with Microsoft Office

My mother is elderly and just loves having pictures of her family all around her house. So as a gift, I created a customized calendar for her. Each month displays pictures of the friend/family member who she should be thinking about that month—for birthdays, anniversaries and special events. She was thrilled with it and bragged about it to all her friends!

If you have someone in your life who you'd like to impress with a really thoughtful gift, a customized photo calendar is fairly easy to put together. And no one says you have to wait until January to give someone a calendar! It's a great idea for Valentine's, Mother's Day, Father's Day or Grandparent's Day. Just start the calendar with that month and make enough pages to get through the year. I guarantee the recipient will love it!

In this article, I'll show you how to create a photo calendar. At minimum, you'll need Microsoft Office, a scanner and access to a printer. A color printer will obviously be best. Your scanner should have included a photo manipulation program, which will help if you need to make any adjustments to any pictures. (I use Paint Shop Pro.)

Get Organized

The first thing you'll need to do is think about what type of calendar you plan to make. If you're an animal lover, or have a friend who has lots of animals, a nice idea might be to put pictures of their pets in the calendar? For grandparents, what could be better than lots of family pictures of all their kids, grand kids and great grand kids?

I created a calendar with a variety of pictures each month, showing each person who was celebrating something that month. I gathered up pictures of each person throughout their life—from baby pictures through school to present day shots. I wrote down all the birthdays/wedding anniversaries for each month and went on a hunt for pictures of each person to display for their month. Some months only had a few folks, but some months were jammed with tons of pictures! This will probably be the most difficult part of the project. Hunting down those great shots and emailing family to get them to send you more pictures.

Once you've gathered up all the pictures, start scanning them. Your scanner should have included a photo editing program that you can use to crop pictures if necessary. If you have a good photo editing program, you can save time by scanning a full page of pictures. Then cut each out of the main picture and save them to the appropriate folder. It's a good idea to save them into separate month folders to keep them organized. Don't worry about the picture size now, because you can adjust the size once you drop them into PowerPoint. However, if you have really large pictures, you might want to read my article on modifying digital photos.

Building your Calendar Month Pages

If you have Microsoft Publisher (install from CD # 2 of Office 2000), you can create nice calendars very easily, but their designs only allow you one or two pictures each month. I knew my calendar would have a collage of shots each month, so I used Publisher for the month pages, but used PowerPoint to assemble the photo pages. Publisher gives you a nice selection of calendar designs. However, if you only have Word, you can use Word's Calendar Wizard and then add some artwork to make the pages fancier.

Open Word and click File/New/Other Documents and you should see the Calendar Wizard icon. (If you don't see it, it means it wasn't installed. So put your Office CD in the drive and click the Add/Remove icon to add all the Wizards to Word.)

A wizard is a little application within a program that helps you create documents. It asks you questions, you make decisions, and the final result is a customized document.

Word's calendar wizard will ask you about the style you want to use, whether you want a picture included on the month page (say No) and what range you want to set. Be sure to make the correct date selection, so you get at least a full year! The wizard will assemble a year's worth of months (or more, if you want) in a Word doc.

If you have Microsoft Publisher, you'll have a wider variety of designs from which to choose. Select your favorite design and use the Publisher wizard to build your calendar pages in that program. Then you can modify font sizes and/or add clipart to holidays.

Once you have the pages set up in Word, you can get fancier by adding extra borders and various clipart to each month. To add page borders in Word, click Format/Borders And Shading/Page Border. Click the Art dropdown and you'll see a selection of border art. Make sure you choose to only apply the art to This section by choosing that option in the Apply to: drop down (see picture below), unless you do want the artwork to appear on all the pages. If that's the case, then select Whole document.

Now it's time to pull out that little Hallmark pocket calendar and go through each month to add some clipart to designate all the holidays. Move your cursor to the date, click Insert/Picture/Clipart.

You can search for the artwork you want by typing a keyword into the search box, such as Valentine, so you can see all your options. Click on the picture you want and click Insert to drop the clipart onto that day.

You might also want to search the Internet for artwork. You can right click any picture you find on the web and click Save Picture As to save it to your hard drive. Then insert the picture from the file. If you need to make any size adjustments, click the picture and drag in one of the corner handles. Use a corner to insure you don't warp the picture and that it resizes properly both vertically and horizontally.

If you're making a family calendar, be sure to go through each month and type in birthdays/anniversaries for all the family members/friends who will be included in the calendar. And make sure to press Ctrl/S often to save your calendar document along the way.

Note! If you have any trouble selecting an item on your calendar, try using the arrow keys to make a selection. Hold down Shift and hit an arrow key to select an item. Sometimes, if you have a lot of small items on the page, it can be difficult to click on just the right spot. The keystrokes can help! Also note that when text is selected, a quick, shortcut way to make the text font size smaller, to easily adjust it to fit in each cell, is to hold down Ctrl/Shift and hit the < (less than) sign to make the font smaller.

Since the days of the month are assembled in a table, you might want to select the table and adjust the date font size to a smaller size. This will give you a little more room and you can then select and resize the calendar table size to make room on each page to add a TextBox.

Draw a few lines in it to add a section for Notes each month. Once you create one note Box, you can select it and copy it to each month. Or start with a design that has some type of box on the side. Then delete that box and add a TextBox, or modify the current box the way you want.

Once you have each month designed the way you want, and you've added all your clipart and noted all the special days, it's time to move on to the picture portion of your calendar.

Building your Calendar Picture Pages

Although you can create the picture pages in Word, I found PowerPoint the perfect application for these pages of my calendar. PowerPoint has some nice features that you can use to make inserting/manipulating pictures a lot easier than dealing with them in Word. But if you only have Word, use that.

Click Insert/Picture/From File and start assembling your photos on a page, or you can use Copy/Paste if they're open in your photo application. You may have to right click each picture and choose Format to modify how the picture sets on the page. PowerPoint is much easier, so use that program if you have it. The directions below are done using PowerPoint.

Rather than just dumping a bunch of pictures on a blank page, I wanted to give the background a little shading effect. Since this calendar was for my 82 year old mother, I knew I'd have a lot of old black and white photos. So I decided to use a gray shading effect because I felt it would help bring out the look of the B&W photos, without overpowering the ones with color. PowerPoint allows you to make some nice gradient designs.

Open a blank page. To keep your sanity, you might want to type the name of the month in the Notes section at the bottom of each slide, so you won't accidentally put March's pictures on February's page!

Click Format/Background. A small dialog box will open with some preset designs. Click the drop down and choose Fill Effects.

This will open a new dialog that will allow you to design some really cool looking backgrounds. Play around with the colors and various directions of shading. You can even choose from a nice selection of textures or patterns.

When you have selected the background look you want, it'll be applied to each of the pages in your project. To add new pages to your presentation, click Insert/New Slide. Be sure to add a 13th slide at the beginning to create your cover page.

Now you're ready to start assembling your photo pages and building your cover page. For my cover page, I selected a few key photos from each generation—when my mom was little, a shot of mom and dad, their kids, and mom with some grand kids Then I added a little artwork to show progression.

Play around with designs and fonts. You'll be surprised how nice you can make your cover look! Then move page by page to each month and start inserting pictures.

Just click Insert/Picture/From File and start plopping each month's photos on the correct page. Once you have all the pictures you need piled on the page, click on each of them to move them around to the best location. Click and drag a corner to adjust the sizing so you can fit them all on the page. Depending on the arrangement, you may need to pile the pictures up on each other a bit to get them to look right. Play around with positioning and remember you can click a picture, right click and select Order to have a picture come forward or move backward in the layout (see picture below).

Note! I also used Paint Shop Pro (PSP) to add small frames around each picture to give them a finished look. If you have PSP, click Image/Add Borders and select white and set the size about 4. Then click Image/Effect/Buttonize and be sure you have a black or gray color as your second color to add a nice frame effect. Or maybe use brown and white or yellow, to create a more wooden looking frame. You can download a free, 30-day evaluation version of PSP from JASC software.

Printing and Assembling your Calendar

Now you're ready for the really fun part!<evil smirk> Printing your calendar can be a little tricky, as I found out on my first attempt when I printed all the picture so they appeared on the bottom of the calendar!<grin> Luckily, I had a second box of calendar pages, so mom's came out correctly.

You can just print out your pages on regular paper or card stock, punch a few holes in each page, tie them together with a little, thin ribbon to allow the pages to flip each month and you're set. But if you have access to a binding machine for binding spiral notebooks, so much the better. Also you can buy inexpensive calendar kits that provide the card stock pages and spiral binding, which you can easily insert by hand. That's what I used. I bought it at my local office supply store. But you can also order this kit, online, directly from Avery (Item # 3278). Click this link to order the kit I used (approx. $18).

Be sure to run a few plain paper tests. Put a line along the side where the spiral holes should be and print a few sample pages. Than turn the pages and print the appropriate month on the other side. Now hold up the page to make sure it looks the way it should! Also, although it was more time consuming, I found more success printing the pages one by one. This way I didn't have two card stock pages pulling through my printer at the same time!

Good luck with your calendar. Feel free to email me if you get into any trouble and need help. It may take you a couple days to assemble all your pictures, scan them, organize and label your month pages, assemble your picture pages, design your cover and print it, but I guarantee that the recipient will be thrilled with this wonderful keepsake gift. They'll appreciate your effort and know it's a true labor of love.