Filofax: DIY Monthly Fold out

My last tutorial on how to make your own planner pages, namely a week on two page template was very popular and this is one of the other major inserts I have made and use in my planner. So I thought it was about time I showed everyone how to make it. If you didn’t catch my other post though you can find it here.

So if you’ve not guessed from the title already, the above photo shows you what this tutorial is going to make. A DIY fold out monthly calender. I think these are great because it allows me to see my week and my month at the same time, so when I am filling out my weekly page I don’t have to keep flipping back and forth. It is also great because I printed my months double sided so when I am on an even month, say October. I can move September/October to the front of my weekly inserts and open it out, whilst having November on the right behind my weekly inserts. It allows me to see two months at once – which is great for planning weekend trips away! Sadly the only downside is if it is an odd month, like November. I can’t see December because it’s on the back of November. It’s not too much of an issue and I’d rather conserve the paper bulk in my planner and so don’t keep one month to one page.

So like my previous post we’ll be using Microsoft Publisher again. It’s a great little program that’s probably on every windows pc/laptop, that you’ve probably never opened! I find it much easier to use than word for making templates. Like my last tutorial this is going to focus on a personal sized planner, but changing the dimensions up you can easily adapt this to other planner sizes.

 

First things first…we need to create the page size. Now this is an uncommon size. The standard size for a personal is 171mm x 95mm. (I like printing at 172mm –  I don’t know why, just do) In order to make a tri-fold you need to measure where your holes on your weekly layout come to. With my hole punch I lose about 8mm of space. so I rounded this up to 10mm, or 1 cm. Which means my first 1/3 of the page will be the standard 95mm, whilst the next two thirds will be 170mm, or 85mm each. So let’s get started.

Open Publisher > File > New > More Blank Pages and Sizes > Create new page size.

Width: 26.5cm

Height: 17.2cm

Margins: 0mm.

Ok > Open a new blank page with this template. 

Now you want to create a table, in this tutorial I’m going to show you with the columns being days of the week (you could easily adapt this to days as rows if you would prefer to do that). So we need to create seven columns. For the moment I recommend creating the table as a 7×1 and having the height of the table at 4mm.

Insert table > 7 x 1 >

Height: 0.5cm

Width: 16.8cm.

Now the size of the table is for a reason. You need to leave 95mm of space free. This will be the section you punch the hole in and when you put you’ll weekly pages on top of it, it’ll be the same size and so cover it. So the remaining 16.8cm is where we want to put the table. However, I’ve left 2mm off just to allow for folding and such.

Now we need more than one row so although this process seems to be long winded and time consuming I recommend doing it with way to get the best visual effect. But to make it simpler you could easily to add in another 7 rows and make the height of the table 17cm. Then just adjust the days of the week row and the month row to a smaller size. I like to be precise though so I’ll show you my way. First we need to align the table.

Select Table> Align > Relative to Margins > Align > Top > Align > Right

Next we are going to duplicate the rows until we reach 17cm in height.

Select table > Right click > Insert > Insert below

To make this process faster:

Ctrl A and repeat the above step (this will double the amount of rows per insert action).

Now we have our table properly established we are going to realign it but first we’re going to add some margins.

Page Designs > Margins > Custom Margins > Right: 0.1cm

Now align the page to the middle and to the right margin. This will give us 1mm of space to allow for printing and cutting error.

Now persuming I have counted correctly we have 34 lines. Now if you look at a calender there is sometimes the possibility that a month can stretch over six week, where part of the first and last week are incomplete weeks. When I looked at the calender for 2015 I think it happened about twice. So I made the decision to have six rows. This means alot of months you won’t use the bottom line – but that could always be used for notes or a quote or something and it just means those two months look neat. So 34 divided by 6 is 5.666. So we don’t have a nice round number to fit in the daily boxes but I want to use some as headers. So we are going to use five lines per box. Now if you would like your monthly calender to be lined you can skip this step. But if not we’re going to merge some cells, so starting at the bottom of your table,  count up five lines in the first column – and make sure only the first column is selected.

Layout > Merge cells.

This will create your daily box.

Keep repeating this step until you have six boxes in the first column. Once completed move onto the other columns. You should have four unused rows at the top. Starting with the fourth row from top, or the one immediately above your daily boxes you’re going to write the days of the week in each column. Pick whatever font you want. The one in this tutorial is Calibri font size ten – nothing special so get creative and do your own font style, but just to keep it within the 5mm box.

Next we’re going to do the month. I merged all the remaining three lines together across all the columns, if you want you could make the day headings a bit bigger and the month one smaller. In my tutorial the month is in Calibri front size 28.

To align the text within the box

Select box (Ctrl A or highlighting with a mouse for multiple boxes) > Layout > Select whatever design you want. I used Centre middle and Centre right.

Now it’s time to colour in some borders. Again this is can be done however you want to do it. I don’t really like borders around the Month or the Day headings…but if you do put them in. Now if you want lines in I recommend changing the colours of the lines. In my one I have showed the clear black borders and the lined grey with the black outside border.

Select the boxes for borders > highlight them > Design > Select line width > Select line colour > Select lines to be coloured.

For the black lines I picked, a width of 1/4 pt, the blackest black and I selected all borders. If you have kept you lines I suggest then selecting all your horizontal lines and changing the colour from black, mine are the second lightest grey.

Then you need to fill it in. Grab a calender, I use my mobile phone for this. Now November starts on a Sunday. So I’m going to go to the first of the box rows and the last column and put a 1. Going to repeat that until I put 30 on the last Monday row (November spans across 6 weeks so it’s great for this).

Now I don’t like the black borders being around ’empty days’. As Sunday is only filled on the first week I took out the vertical lines that weren’t in use. You can repeat the step above but just remove lines rather than adding them. I also centred my numbers to be top middle but repeating the steps like we did before.

And that is the month complete.

Now we are going to do the reverse month which is just a simple change. On the left hand side of the program you should see a miniature of your monthly page. Right click that and duplicate it, placing it below your November. This is going to be December. But it’s going to be reversed. So to do that we’re going to add a margin of 2 mm (this will onset the printer adjustment), and then move the table to the new position.

Page Design > Margins > Custom Margins > Left 0.2cm

Select Table > Align Left

Now I changed the November heading to December and also moved it to the left. Then just delete the numbers and reorder them to the correct days. Adjust the vertical lines to add them in and take them away at the right places and you are done making you’re monthly layout. Just repeat for the following months.

The next post will show you how to print them. If you have any queries please leave a comment below and I’ll answer them for you.