Calendars vs Docs

[cpgm]

Not 100% sure if this is the right forum, but perhaps you can point me in the right direction...

 

 

At the moment, our school uses a Google Doc in place of a calendar for all of the school events. I'm trying to switch over to a general "School Events" calendar on Google, however staff are missing the ability to easily print the events for the school term.

 

 

Is there an easy way or service that I could use that would assist with this? I'd like there to be a site or a doc that people can open that reflects the current events in the calendar, and views the whole 10 week term all at once?

 

 

Thanks so much for your help!

[jthompson]

Google Calendar does have some print options. For a whole term, the best option might be to go to month view and then selet print from the cog menu. Pick your date range and deselect the option to include weekends, if appropriate. It'll run to a few pages, but settings the print output to 4 pages per sheet might help there. Not super great, but easy enough to roll off future copies if any calendar events get added, removed or changed.

 

Seems like a shame to have to print out an online calendar, though, but I get that people still might want it on a wall.

[psydii]

In my experience, the Head wants the whole school calendar presented 'just so'. Online versions just can't deliver. Also Calendars primarily designed for managing an individual's diary don't scale well when tracking whole organizational events.

 

Online calendars are also not great for planning and coordinating the entire organization - so the data is worked on in (typically) a spreadsheet, and so presenting it in that tool makes sense.

 

I've seen four attempts to move to Outlook/Google Calendars fizzle out - absolutely everybody uses Outlook/Google for their personal diary, and sometimes for their teams' - but planning and reference calendars are always on a wall, in excel or in a pdf for quick reference.

[mavhc]

Once you have the data in the calendar, you can display it however you wish, get the iCal link and format the data eg with https://www.printablecal.com/

[dhicks]

get the iCal link and format the data eg with https://www.printablecal.com/

 

That does require Microsoft Office 365 / 2007 or later for Windows. It turns out that the DOCX file format is basically a bunch of resources stuck in a Zip archive - change a .DOCX file's extension to .ZIP and you can unpack it. The text is in an XML file, editable with a text editor, hence it is quite easy to make a basic find-and-replace tool for DOCX files:

 

https://github.com/dhicks6345789/docx-merge

 

We have the above script running as part of a batch file that downloads a DOCX template file from Google Drive, does a find-and-replace to put live calendar data into the DOCX file, uploads the resultant DOCX file to Google Drive, downloads that file again (!), this time as a PDF using Drive's built-in download-DOCS-as-a-PDF feature, giving us a PDF document we can point people to for a printed calendar. I also have a utility to do a week-to-view version as a single "zine"-style booklet:

 

https://github.com/dhicks6345789/pdf-n-up

 

Neither of the above are really completed projects at the moment, they're just the parts we needed to implement what we were aiming for.