1 January 2023

2023 calendars in Word and the tricks to make them special

Peter Deegan Featured, Fonts, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Office for Mac, Microsoft Word, Office 2007, Office 2010, Office 2013, Office 2016, Office 2019, Office 2021 / Office LTSC, Office 365 Calendars

Word has many 2023 calendars in the File | New templates supplied by Microsoft. There are tricks to getting the most from the templates and make them personal and special.

Search for ‘ calendar’ in the File | New pane.

There are no specific year calendars for 2023 – they are all programmed templates, type in type in the year and Word will do the rest.

Find the overall calendar look

Ignore labels like ‘Family’, ‘Floral’, ‘Event’ on the calendars – they don’t matter.

Just look for an overall design that suits what you need. Whole year on a page, month to a page, with or without notes, image on left or right etc.

Week starting on Sunday or Monday — some templates come with that choice, others don’t.

All the formatting, images and graphics can be changed.

Yearly calendar on a single page

There are two more yearly calendars which are almost the same but one is Monday start of week, the other a Sunday start.

Monthly calendar (one page per month).

The ‘Academic’ and ‘Horizontal’ calendars above have two versions: Sunday or Monday week start.

You have to check other template descriptions to see if it has Sunday/Monday start-of-week options.

Many more Word 2023 calendars

There is an ‘any year’ Word calendar template which makes a calendar document for any year you specify.

As an example we’ll open the Photo Calendar template

Choose that calendar then Create. Wait while the template downloads and opens in Word. Then just select the year and month you want.

This template creates a new tab with some quick options:

Select New Dates – opens the Year and Month selector again to choose another month.

Themes – Quickly change the overall look, colors or fonts from the pull-down lists.

We suggest changing the picture first, then select a color theme that complements the picture.

In this example we changed the picture then selected a Theme | Color that works with the photo. We also removed the title (Delete the table row) since we don’t need it.

A web search will find many other calendar templates.

The ones from Microsoft direct that are probably all you need. They have a range of basic formats (year to a page or month to a page) and can be quickly changed in design and text to suit you.

Changing the calendar

Each calendar template is just a Word document that you can change to suit yourself.

The main text elements have styles. Right-click to choose Modify Style the change the font, size, color etc.

Text

The text in any box of the month can be changed or added or change the date number.

Calendar grid

The calendar grid is a table. Change the calendar lines from Table | Design | Borders, click on the icon at bottom right to open the full Borders and Shading dialog.