Make a printable calendar
Pick a month and a full grid appears, measured to fill the sheet with the biggest day squares the paper allows.
How it works
A wall calendar does one thing a phone cannot: it shows a whole month to everyone in the room at once, with nobody unlocking anything. That is why the fridge door outlasted the smartphone. What follows is built for that job rather than for reading on a screen, so the day numbers are set large and the squares are left mostly empty for you to fill in.
Landscape buys writing room
Seven columns across the short edge of A4 leaves each day about 75 points wide, which is 26 millimetres, or four or five characters of adult handwriting. Turn the sheet and the same seven columns get 110 points each. Rows lose height in exchange, but a day square runs out of width long before it runs out of height, so landscape wins for anything going on a wall. Portrait earns its place in a ring binder, where a sideways sheet has to be turned to read.
Monday or Sunday
Both conventions are correct and neither is universal. ISO 8601 puts Monday first, the order most of Europe prints and the one any week number has to agree with. North American calendars start on Sunday, splitting the weekend across the two ends of the row. Pick the one your household reads without stopping to think about it. Week numbering stays ISO under either setting, because the standard defines a week by the Thursday inside it rather than by the column it happens to be drawn in.
Leap years and the sixth row
The grid is computed from the calendar, so February 2024 fills 29 squares and February 2025 fills 28. Row count follows from that: a 31-day month beginning on the last day of your week needs six rows, and a 28-day February beginning exactly on the first day needs only four. Rows are then measured to fill the sheet in every case, so some months print with taller squares than others, and none print with a stub row hanging off the bottom.
How many ruled lines a square holds
Empty squares look clean and get written in crookedly. Faint rules fix that, and three is the usual number on a landscape sheet: they sit under the day number without crowding it, at a weight light enough to vanish behind pen. Ask for none on a square you want to draw in or stick a sticker on. Six-row months and portrait sheets leave shorter squares, so the count drops automatically once the spacing would fall under about four millimetres.
Dates marked before you print
Birthdays, bin day and payday do not move around much, and copying them out by hand twelve times over is why a printed year usually goes blank by March. Put a date and a short label in the table and it prints into that square in small type, leaving the rest of the space free to write on. A label wider than the square is clipped instead of running into the neighbouring day.
Margins, and what a printer clips
No desk printer prints to the paper edge, and most reserve four to six millimetres of it. This sheet keeps 12.7 millimetres clear on all four sides, which covers that strip with enough left over that the outer frame does not come out shaved. Send it at 100 percent rather than the fit-to-page setting your print dialog probably defaults to: fitting adds a second margin inside the first and shrinks the squares you came here for.
Questions
Are the week numbers the same ones my work calendar shows?
They are ISO 8601 week numbers, as used by Outlook, most European scheduling software and every shipping timetable. Some North American systems number weeks differently, treating the week that holds 1 January as week 1 regardless of which day it starts on. The two agree for most of the year and can differ by one across the turn of it, so check your first week of January against whatever you are cross-referencing before trusting the number.
Can I get a whole year in one file?
One run produces one month. Generate the twelve you want, then combine them into a single document with the merge tool, which keeps the page order you arrange. That route also lets you skip months, repeat one, or mix orientations inside the same file.
Why does it open on the month it does?
The month and year boxes start on today's date, read from your own machine's clock rather than baked in when the page was published. Change either and the grid redraws. Any year from 1900 to 2200 works, and the weekday a month starts on is derived from the date rather than looked up in a table, so a distant year is as correct as next month.
Do the greyed dates from the next month cost extra ink?
Barely, and they can be switched off. Those neighbouring dates print in light grey so the eye can tell them from the month you asked for. Turning them off leaves those squares blank, which some people prefer as overflow space for writing.
Will an A4 sheet print correctly on Letter paper?
Change the paper setting and rebuild rather than letting the printer scale it. A4 sent to a Letter tray gets shrunk by about six percent and shifted, which is survivable but pushes the margins off centre. The paper choice here changes the page dimensions written into the file, so the printer has nothing left to correct.