WinCalendar

WinCalendar by Sapro Systems simplifies the process of making calendars in Word and Excel. Working inside these Microsoft programs, WinCalendar also expands your options. Its templates and automated features generate colorful, flexible calendars for planning, notekeeping, and many other uses. It tracks holidays and much more; at least, the full version does. The free trial is intended as a demo of WinCalendar's capabilities, not as fully functional freeware, and the trial version limits several features, including holidays, calendar size, and format, and it places a watermark on saved calendars. Its comprehensive Help file and a wizard-based calendar maker do a respectable job of introducing this shareware Office add-on, though.

You'll have to close and reopen Word or Excel if they're open when installing WinCalendar. Our installation finished with the Help file's "How Do I?" page of quick links to all major topics. WinCalendar's controls showed up on Word's ribbon (Excel's, too). Aside from Register, About, and Help buttons, it only has two controls: Show WinCalendar and Calendar Maker. We started the Calendar Maker. This wizard-like tool offered lots of choices, starting with a menu of templates in the Type & Date Range field: weekly, monthly, yearly, schedule, and agenda; as well as Data & Format, Size & Orientation, and Options. When we tried accessing features disabled in the free trial, a nag message popped up. But we were able to make basic selections and preview them. Our finished product appeared in a new Word document. It was attractive and professional in execution, as good as any we'd seen. The watermark is large but faint, and major holidays were indicated in red (you can't customize them in the free trial). We could enter and save data like any calendar made in Word or Excel. WinCalendar worked equally well in both Office applications, with similar options and results.

About the Show WinCalendar button: clicking it produces a neat little desktop calendar with some interesting tricks; for example, clicking any highlighted date copies the day and date (in your format) into Word or Excel. Bottom line: The trial limits didn't obscure WinCalendar's capabilities.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of WinCalendar 3.43.