Use Outlook to Create Web Calendars

Hundreds of people and organizations apparently use Outlook to produce calendars for the Web. I've found Outlook calendars for schools, teams, singing groups, churches, military units—even a car club—on the Web.

Most organizations that publish calendars with Microsoft Word and Outlook use a free Word template that Microsoft released several years ago. Two other calendar templates are available: a set of modifications to the Microsoft template and an independently developed template. You'll find URLs for all three templates at the end of this article.

The three templates all work the same way. When you create a new document with the template, Word runs a macro that asks you to choose a few options (e.g., which calendar folder to use, whether to build a weekly or monthly calendar). Word then accesses the items in the source calendar folder, builds a table in the Word document, and copies the information from the Outlook items into the table. You can then use the File, Save As command to save the page as an HTML file that you can post on your Web site.

These templates are great because they're so customizable. After Word builds the document from the Outlook data, you can edit the Word document and change fonts, highlight words with color, add clip art, or perform other functions. If you're handy with Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), you can even customize the macros that generate the document from Outlook's appointments. (These templates are also wonderful teaching tools if you're learning how to design custom print routines for other Outlook folders or how to automate Word or Outlook in general.)

Even if you don't need to put a calendar on the Web, the templates solve one of the great annoyances of printing calendars from Outlook. Outlook shows thumbnails for 2 months at the top of the calendar, but it always adds thumbnail calendars for the current month and the next month, not for the last month and the next month, as you'd expect and as the templates add.

Here's a tip if you plan to use any of these Word templates: Change the title of the page before you put it on your Web site. You can open the HTML page in Notepad and change the