I'd guess the count of a particular month's days could be shown next to its name as an aid? Esp. given that Feb tends to have it different in different years (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feb_29).
To find the current day of the week, look at the row corresponding to the day of the month and the column corresponding to the month. There's a typo for the days 18-21 where there's two 18s.
For the last 3 years I've been printing several copies of the Compact Calendar by David Seah [1]. It's as its name implies a compact form calendar that spans the whole year in a single page, and leaves enough side space to annotate stuff as needed.
It's very cool and useful, although it would be nice having an open-source based version (i.e. LibreOffice), for those of us that don't have an MS Office license...
(not sure why but upon checking the website I'm seeing all text and links scrambled in the page, probably the author inadvertently broke it during an update)
Wow I just discovered that it's uBlock Origin that totally breaks the page layout. Which means that for some reason this page's CSS are detected as an ad source, and blocked! Curious, as it seems to be a plain and simple static site.
It's also blocked by Fanboy's annoyances list. It's a generic blocker, /wp-gdpr, probably designed to block a Wordpress plugin's GDPR banner. My guess is this site is using such a plugin, and then stuck the rest of its CSS in the plugin's folder instead of a generic folder like CSS, so it ends up blocked there too. You can whitelist this URL on the site if you want without having to whitelist the site as a whole.
What do you mean “open source”? XLS is the (previously proprietary) format used by older versions that’s (basically) just serialized structs. XLSX (which I see here) is the ZIP/XML based version based on an open standard[0][1]. LibreOffice opens those just fine from my experience; It’s the older binary format that LibreOffice can screw up with formatting.
You are right although as I understood it, the MS standard is exceedingly complicated, some would say in an attempt to "obfuscate" it.
In any case, this specific excel template states that it requires Excel 2007 and might misbehave if using any other program such as OpenOffice or Google Sheets:
> Please note that Microsoft Excel 2007 or newer is required. Other software like Open Office, Google Docs, and Numbers may import the Excel spreadsheet, but due to differences in the way they handle dates you should double-check that the calendars are correct.
Perhaps things have gotten better, but OOXML is not an open format by the normal usage of the word (text based does not mean open). OOXML was rushed through the standardization process, and was entirely created by one vendor (Microsoft).
Microsoft doesn't even bother to support the OOXML format completely, as the Wikipedia article notes.
Oh cool! I happened to build something similar a while back, because I was frustrated with the way that the Unix `cal` program laid out all the months in a 3 x 4 grid instead of in a continuous format:
I print a bunch of these (sometimes multiple calendars on a page) and stick them up on the wall. Very useful to separate events / agendas of different classes on separate calendars e.g. birthdays, travel plans, project deadlines, appointments, goal tracking, habit tracking all go on different calendars but on the same wall.
Much cleaner than putting them all on the same calendar and fight for space.
It renders fine for me in Firefox, but garbled in Chrome. Disabling this CSS rule "fixes" the layout for me in Chrome, without breaking anything obvious in Firefox:
You can tell that 2020 is a leap year because if you look up the day of the week for Feb. 28, it's Friday, and March 1st is a Sunday. That must mean that Feb. 29th is a Saturday. And indeed it is.
It took me a while, but I think I have it: choose a month of the year in the blue table and read only the column pertaining to that month. The column has seven days within it and the first day in the column matches the first day of that month; then, increment each day and date until reaching the maximum for the month and proceed to the next month in its matching column. Never move right to left in the blue month table as if moving through a standard calendar's format; only loop through the column for the current month from top to bottom.
This is super cool. Since I usually read Month, Date, Year - would've been awesome if the months/day was on the left. Took me a minute to read it - but makes a lot of sense.
1. On the left under "Dates" are the consecutive days of the month if you read column by column (of course not every month has 31 days).
2. The rows represent intervals of a week (hence each square is previous + 7).
3. Look first at the top left cell with June and Monday. That lines up with the days of the month 1, 8, 15, 22, 29. That's because those are all the Mondays of June.
4. Next row (same column) shows similar: The Tuesdays of June are 2, 9, 16, etc.
So you can start with any month (the columns) and look at the first row underneath to see which day of the week the month starts on and then follow the dates from there using the above logic.
My thought was "Your calendar is bad and you should feel bad." It's a reference and I don't actually mean that, except as a reaction to seeing it after clicking the title on HN which had me expecting something I might want to use.
I am guessing that people outside the US do not have as much trouble, as the format is naturally dd/mm/yyyy instead of mm/dd/yy, so reading left to right is more natural.
It took me a brief moment to acclimate to this, but after I did I felt it was pretty straightforward and elegant.
One of them is very similar to this one (Design 2) - I was tidying up someone else's idea. Dunno if David Seah's was related in any way or just people came up with the same idea.
Agreed. I love stacking the months like that and turning it into a never-ending river of days, looks like it'd be easier to estimate the length of time between two different months.
107 comments
[ 0.33 ms ] story [ 174 ms ] threadThen you build a new year of the calendar.
Also, a somewhat related purely-mechanical idea I recently learnt of and liked: https://www.etsy.com/listing/570041707/desk-wood-eternal-cal...
Love it though.
...
old -> fixed
17 -> 17
18 -> 18
18 -> 19
19 -> 20
20 -> 21
...
https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/
I print this every year for almost a decade now!
EDIT: Now I am. Clever!
- Is this generated using a known algorithm? Can the same trick be applied to other years?
Very cool idea!
It's very cool and useful, although it would be nice having an open-source based version (i.e. LibreOffice), for those of us that don't have an MS Office license...
[1]: https://davidseah.com/node/compact-calendar/
(not sure why but upon checking the website I'm seeing all text and links scrambled in the page, probably the author inadvertently broke it during an update)
EDIT: It is the "AdGuard Annoyances" optional list, which is disabled by default but I like to enable: https://kb.adguard.com/en/general/adguard-ad-filters#annoyan...
[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
[1]: ECMA-376, http://www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecm...
In any case, this specific excel template states that it requires Excel 2007 and might misbehave if using any other program such as OpenOffice or Google Sheets:
> Please note that Microsoft Excel 2007 or newer is required. Other software like Open Office, Google Docs, and Numbers may import the Excel spreadsheet, but due to differences in the way they handle dates you should double-check that the calendars are correct.
Microsoft doesn't even bother to support the OOXML format completely, as the Wikipedia article notes.
It's a poor standard (including, iirc, normative references to behavior of particular proprietary software), but it's standardized and free to use.
[+ attribution] Many thanks to Pedro Pablo Fuentes Schuster for this Google Sheets conversion! http://pedrofuent.es/
https://github.com/jez/calz
So for example to get the same year-long calendar view as the Compact Calendar would have, I can type
calz has a couple other features too which make it nicer to use than `cal`, but those are beside the point.Now I just need a really long e-ink screen.
Much cleaner than putting them all on the same calendar and fight for space.
@media (min-width: 500px) .calendar td, .calendar th { max-width: 0; }
I'm not actually sure what benefit that rule provides in the first place, but I haven't done any serious CSS hacking in forever.
there are only 5 dates columns; how do you read days in month columns 6 and 7 (feb aug mar nov)?
am i suppossed to matrix multiply this thing or what. im not normally too dumb for things but boy this is totally opaque to me.
EG the 1st, 8th, 15th, 22nd, and 29th of January, April, and July all fall on Wednesday.
Or, May 18th is a Tuesday.
1. On the left under "Dates" are the consecutive days of the month if you read column by column (of course not every month has 31 days).
2. The rows represent intervals of a week (hence each square is previous + 7).
3. Look first at the top left cell with June and Monday. That lines up with the days of the month 1, 8, 15, 22, 29. That's because those are all the Mondays of June.
4. Next row (same column) shows similar: The Tuesdays of June are 2, 9, 16, etc.
So you can start with any month (the columns) and look at the first row underneath to see which day of the week the month starts on and then follow the dates from there using the above logic.
It's an interesting design exercise, but I can't imagine people using this day to day.
It took me a brief moment to acclimate to this, but after I did I felt it was pretty straightforward and elegant.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/joelanman/albums/7215759450272...
One of them is very similar to this one (Design 2) - I was tidying up someone else's idea. Dunno if David Seah's was related in any way or just people came up with the same idea.
http://www.elzr.com/blag/infodesign-challenge/