iKaushal

Today I was browsing casually through lifehacker.com and read this post on 2009 Compact Calendar by David Seah.  This wasn’t new… I have been a fan of David Seah and have known of his productivity tools since a year or so.

I got inspired by the calendar designed by David which you can obtain from this link.  The only thing that bugged me was that his calendars run from Jan to Dec.  I required a Fiscal calendar that ran from Nov to Oct. I adapted the ideas from David’s work like:

• Using the Date functions inbuilt in Excel.
• Using Conditional Formatting in Excel.
• Making the calendar user-customizable i.e. the user can change the calendar year as well as the days when there should be holidays.

In this process of reverse engineering, I learned quite a few new-for-me cool features of Excel using Google and Excel Help.

The result… I am able to churn out my own custom Fiscal Calendar :)

Click to download this calendar [FiscalCalendar.xlsx].  Check Update 3 below. Excel 2007 is required to use this file.

Fiscal Calendar in Excel 2007

Instructions:

1. The file has 3 worksheets/tabs: Calendar, Holidays, Calculations.
2. Calendar tab is where you’ll see the calendar and you can print the selection of calendar you like.  Make sure you don’t print the whole worksheet else it will also print the link to this page and the small note at the bottom.
3. You can change the Fiscal year by changing the year in cell A1, which you can see selected in the screenshot above.
4. Currently, the calendar can show up to 20 holidays.  You can enter the dates for holidays in the Holidays tab.  Just to avoid any buggy behavior, enter the dates in mm/dd/yyyy fashion in column A only in the green-shaded area in this tab.
5. Calculations tab is used by the Calendar tab to automate the display of month abbreviations in proper rows and to calculate the day of the week for November 1 of the set fiscal year.
6. The calendar should function properly is nothing is modified in the Calculations tab :)

Any suggestions for improvement are welcome!

I’d like to thank David Seah for this idea.

Update 1:
Fonts shrunk so that the whole calendar fits on a single letter-sized page.  .xlsx file in the download link above updated accordingly.

Update 2:
In case you cannot open the .xlsx (Excel 2007) file, you can download the PDF version below.
Download FiscalCalendar_2008-2009.pdf

Update 3:
This one’s a good update.  Earlier the user was able to specify which year calendar he wanted.  Now the user can also specify from which month he wants his 12-month calendar to start.  It could be Jan-Dec, Nov-Oct, Aug-Jul,… whatever the user wants :)  Also the Calculations worksheet described above is eliminated… I just made the formulae more complicated to remove that redundant worksheet.

Instructions: Use cell A1 to enter starting year, cell B1 to enter starting month.

Download here. (.xlsx file, Excel 2007 required.)

Here’s what the updated file looks like.

Calendar in Excel 2007

… This was a quick update.  Let me know if there are any bugs.

Enjoy!