Organizing Tip Thursday - creating your own personalized planner pages

Interested in printing your own planner pages, or not quite finding a planner that fits your needs? There are several great free downloads available out there that you might like – my favorites being the various planning pages available from Amy at MomAdvice and the variety of planning related downloads available at SimpleMom.

I love Simplemom’s daily docket, but I wanted something a bit different. If you’re looking to customize your own planner pages, excel is an easy way to create them! Here is a picture of the page I created – again it’s loosely based on the daily docket:

Here is quick tutorial if you’re interested.

1. Come up with a basic design that you want to create and roughly sketch it out on a piece of paper.
2. Open excel and start copying the sections of your planner pages into the cells, in the general area where you want each of them to appear. You can adjust the width of columns by holding your cursor on the line between a column, click and dragging your cursor either direction with your mouse.
3. In order to create boxes or lines under your cells, go to “Format” then “Cells” and click on the “borders” tab. From there you can choose the location and thickness of the line you want.
4. If you want to add some shapes to your planner like the little suns I have, go to “Insert” and click on “Picture” then choose “Autoshapes”. That should open a toolbar that will allow you to choose lines or basic shapes to paste anywhere on your sheet.
5. If you want certain sections to be wider than others, you can merge cells. Highlight the cells you want to merge and click on “Format” then “Cells” and choose the “Alignment” tab. There is a “Merge” option that you can check to merge the cells you have highlighted.
6. To check the layout of your page, click on “File” and “Print Preview”.
7. If your page is too big or too small, you can adjust the width of your columns to better fit the page.

The nice thing about printing your own pages, besides that you can tailor them to your needs, is that you can print them half size, double sided, and/or put them in plastic covers and reuse them with a dry erase marker!

I hope this was helpful rather than confusing. Let me know if you have any questions and I can try to answer them. Feel free to use my planner page if you'd like. Can anyone help me attach it as a pdf file instead of an image? For some reason that seems above my ability to figure out today. Happy Planning!

Now it's your turn - please link up your organizing ideas and help a mama out! Also, this week's Finding Freedom Friday at Phoebe's blog Cents to get debt free is on organization, check it out!