Need Calendar Software to type in Personal Notes

Factual Questions
1

I’ve used various calendar programs before. Many just create a calendar for a month and then you print it. Hand write any notations like Doctors Appointments and other stuff. I did that for years at the office. Jotting down meetings, days I was off sick, vacation days etc. Every month print off a fresh calendar and pin it to my corkboard.

Anyone know of a calendar program that lets you create entries anytime you want?

For example June 17 I watered the front yard flowerbed
June 18 I watered the container flowers
June 19 I watered the front & side yard
June 20 I watered the back yard

Each day, I want to sit down and briefly make notes on things I have to do routinely. Then I want to see the Entire Month’s calendar on my screen with the notations.

I could just jot down these entries in notepad. But, the visual impact of a monthly calendar would be so much more useful.

Sad to say as I approach fifty my memory just isn’t what it used to be. Especially repetitive things that are closely related. Like watering. Ok, I watered something two days ago, what the hell was it? Oh, that’s right I watered such and such already this week.

2

Another option is Excel 2003. Can it create a monthly calendar like you’d print & pin to a corkboard? Then I could simply enter my notations in the cells.

3

You can create a calender with Excel, but why not just use Outlook? It’s got a monthly calender that you can print with notations.

4

We started using the web client for GMail at work. I also use the web client for Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. It’s been at least six years since I configured Outlook for email. We used Outlook for all our email in the 1990’s.

I wonder if OUtlook will let me use the Calendar and Address book without configuring it to read mail?

5

Yes, it will.

6

Cool.

Works like a charm. The wizard came up and I told it no, that I didn’t want email.

I’d totally forgotten all about Outlook because I always associated it with Email. We ran our own Exchange server in my office and used Outlook exclusively to connect to it. With Exchange, the phone book and calendars were saved on the Exchange server as part of their Exchange Account. We went to Gmail and the Web based client in 2004.

Thanks

7

Well, I just didn’t care that much for Outlook’s calendar. Too much stuff in it. It kept trying to create appointment reminders for me. All I want is to record daily notes.

There is a Calendar Creator out there that creates Spreadsheets. But, I wasn’t interested in paying their license fee. Also, I worry about malware Macros in somebody elses Spreadsheet. I decided to write my own on a boring Tues afternoon at work. I plan to use it at work too, so it is a legit work project.

Took less than an hour to write my own. Use your Language of Choice. Mine is COBOL, but any language that has a day of the week function and can create a standard ASCII Text file will work.

Input from Console the Month and Year desired. Use day of week function to determine what day the 1st is on.

Case Statement
When Sun “1,2,3,4 all the way to 30”
When Mon ",1,2,3,4
When Tue ",1,2,3,4
When Wed ",1,2,3,4
When Thu “,1,2,3,4”
when Fri “,1,2,3,4”
When Sat “,1,2,3,4”

You’ll need another Case statement to check for 28, 30 or 31 days in a specific month. I didn’t code anything for leap year. But it wouldn’t be hard to check for it.

Last field in the data record should be the name of the Month and Year. Formatted like June - 2012

Write the record and close file. My program has about 20 lines of procedural code.

Over on Excel – I created a simple spreadsheet that looks like a monthly calendar. Row Height 100 and Column width 18 fit nicely in landscape on a sheet of paper.

Import Data Text - go through the wizard, indicating comma delimited, data types General

Save the spreadsheet (as Calendar-Template.xls) and that also saves the Data Import that you just setup.

Run the program to create the comma delimited text file, Open Excel and the spreadsheet. Import Data. Save it as Month-year.xls

8

“1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,July-2012”

is July’s data record. July starts on a Sunday

Anyhow, it was a fun diversion for a boring afternoon. Reminds me of why I got into programming in the first place. I love puzzles.

9

Sorry, I forgot to mention that you need a carriage return after every seven days.

like this in your comma delimited file. Otherwise Excel will import it all into the same row.
Also, on the very last step of the Import Wizard, click properties and uncheck change column width. Otherwise, by default Excel ruins all the column formatting that you previously set up in the template.

Import Wizard can be a PITA. If it imports wrong. Close the spreadsheet. Don’t save. Reopen the spreadsheet and try again. Import wizard can ruin a spreadsheet (by messing with the column widths) and there’s no Undo. Closing without saving is the only recovery.

1,2,3,4,5,6,7,
8,9,10,11,12,13,14,
15,16,17,18,19,20,21,
22,23,24,25,26,27,28,
29,30,31,July-2012