Calme

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on March 20, 2012

Calendars and Day Planners printed on paper may not be as common as they once were, but they're not going away any time soon, either, to judge by the desks, cubicle walls, and refrigerator doors we've seen lately. Calme is a free tool for creating attractive, top-quality calendars and planners that you can use on your PC or print out on paper. It creates picture calendars with huge, high-resolution images and monthly and yearly planners in a variety of layouts. You can customize your holidays and language, too.

Calme's interface opens with its 12 templates displayed; seven planners and five picture calendars, though we could click the Planners or Picture Calendar tabs to narrow the selection. Following the wizard-based process, we chose a picture calendar that is almost all picture, with a linear date display beneath; a modern, stylish look. It opened in a zoom-enabled main view with tabs for Date (the current date appeared by default) and Holidays, which involved checking a box to display holidays and downloading and selecting a national holiday file from a long list of countries in two available files, 2011 and 2011. Clicking Internet Update refreshed the file list with updated choices. To the left of the main view, a series of buttons gave us control over nearly every aspect of our calendar: Format, Margins, Border, Font, and more. We could make quick changes and preview them instantly or click an Undo button to go back in case we forgot the name of the font we liked four or five fonts back. The Image Editor's slider quickly resized our images to fit the frame, and the toolbar also offers a variety of controls for positioning, cropping, and other fine-tuning procedures. The Print Preview let us avoid major blunders before hitting Print, though we could also save our creation as a calme file (CME). High-quality images and paper produced the best results.

Calme's user interface offers several themes. We'd like to see a borderless view for desktop calendar displays or the ability to save documents in other formats. Calme excels at creating high-quality printed calendars and planners, though.