How Do I Print a Calendar on My Mac?

By: Chris Kerins
Published: Thursday, January 15, 2009
Categories: How do I...?

 

There are several options for printing calendars with your new Mac, so the first thing to sort out is what kind of calendar you need. Let's start from the most basic to the most elaborate.

Basic Empty Calendar

iCal will take care of your most basic calendar needs. It has a well developed Print options box to fine tune your printing from. That's really where it shines. Take a look at the example below.

For a quick and dirty blank calendar to print from, you'll want to open iCal and make sure you have a calendar in the left column without any events in it. The print options box wants you to select at least one calendar, so if you want it blank, make sure you have one to choose.

Then just select Print in the File menu to get the options box. Turn off as many options as you want to make an empty one. Note how you can change the paper size in case you want other size options. Also note that you can choose between Month, Week, Day and List views.

Calendar With My Events and Holidays

The process is the same as above, but this time you'll want to check the boxes for options you want to include. Note that you can use subscriptions to many types of events such as US Holidays or sports schedules to populate your calendar. This is also a good time to color code your different calendars because iCal will print the events out in color. So spend some time to dial in your normal iCal view before going to Print.

Calendar with Events PLUS Graphic Themes and Pictures

To get some really cool themed layouts and pictures, you'll want to combine your efforts in iCal with iPhoto. Go ahead and start in iCal and get your various calendars dialed in just right. Then go to iPhoto and start making a photo album with photos you'll want in your calendar. You can see our article How Do I Create a Calendar from My Photos in iPhoto for more details. Don't forget to select which calendars from iCal you want to use.

The trick to printing out your own calendar you create in iPhoto is once you have finished the creation process, right-click on your calendar and select Save Calendar as PDF. This will save a multi page PDF document on your Mac where ever you designate.

Now you can open the PDF file in Preview and print any or all the pages as desired. You can do this just to get one blank month with a theme too.

Your Great Calendar Professionally Printed
So what if you spend a lot of time to create an awesome calendar in iPhoto and it doesn't print well? In this case, just go ahead and hit the Buy Calendar button in the lower right of iPhoto and have Apple print, bind it and ship it to you. They start at $20 for 12 months. I've been doing it this way for several years now and my family loves it.

So there are some great options for you to get a calendar printed. The most basic you can fire off in a minute or two, or you can take an hour or two and create a keepsake that you'll treasure for years. It's up to you, so get started now!


Do you have any suggestions or questions? Let us know in the Comments section below!