Simply Calenders at first glance appears a little outdated in its design. However, it offers a lot more features than many of the other calendar software we reviewed, and it's easy to use. For these reasons, Simply Calenders is our TopTenREVIEWS Silver Award winner.
Simply Calenders has released several versions, but the interface design has stayed fundamentally the same. The icons on the buttons look old, which causes this calendar software to appear outdated. Don't let the button designs fool you, though; you'll still find a large number of effective and useful features. You'll even find that the Simply Calenders menu options have expanded to include more color-management options.
Templates
This calendar software by Simply Calenders offers more than 60 templates. You'll find popular styles such as those with a large image above and the calendar below. Some calendars are formatted with the image running down the center of the page and the months on either side. Others overlap the image and the calendar. You'll find annual, monthly and weekly calendars.
Among the options in this calendar software, you'll also find academic, fiscal, advent, and even maternity and CD-case calendars. Several of the formats are designed so you can fold them into freestanding prisms. If we could request an additional feature, it would be a blank template with the ability to design a customized calendar.
The templates don't offer many personalization options, but they do have a few. For instance, with this calendar software, you can have grid lines that separate the days or opt to go without them. If you do have grid lines, you can have them appear as squares, three-dimensional boxes, squares with rounded edges or with ruled lines that you can later write on.
You can add moon phases, religious events, holidays and your own events to your calendars. You can also change the color of select dates if you want them to stand out. You can adjust which day starts your week, such as Monday instead of Sunday, for instance. Another way you can customize your calendar is to add your company's logo if your calendar is for a business. You can also create a bilingual calendar. Simply Calenders has more than 100 languages for international users.
Design Features
When it comes to creating your calendar, Simply Calenders provides tools to help you bring all of the design aspects together to make a professional-looking finished product. With this calendar software, you can select the font, text size and text color. When you choose a font, you can see a small preview of it on the right side of the screen. You can also bold, italicize and underline the text. Simply Calenders provides a long list of font choices, but if you don't see the font you want, you can look for it on the Skerryvore website.
With this calendar software, you can also adjust the line style and background color. Throughout the application, you can select either basic colors or find a specific color through the custom colors option. You can add the custom color to your palate if you want to so that you can find it easily in the future.
One thing to keep in mind with this calendar software is that the font choices, and colors ¬– both for the text and the background ¬– apply to the whole calendar, not just the month or page you are viewing when you make those selections. This can be nice if you want all of the pages to have the same look; however, if you want the background color to correspond with the picture, this may be an annoyance.
Adding photos to your calendar through this calendar software is easy. All you have to do is browse your computer files to find them. If your image is a large file, you may need to decrease the size of the file.
When you have the images you want to add to your calendar, you can add them one at a time or upload them all through one photo box, assigning them to specific locations. When you select the images from your computer files, you can change your file selections to show thumbnail images; however, once you have selected a file, Simply Calenders only shows the file name and not a thumbnail until you save the selections. Once you do this, you can preview the calendar and see the images you've selected. Two missing image options we would have liked to see in this calendar software are photo collages and background designs that we could have added to our calendars.
If you want to edit your images, you can do so within the Simply Calenders application. The editing features include clone, vignettes, special effects, color-balance tools, contrast and balance, airbrush, freehand drawing tools, text, lines, shapes and more. When using the color balance and other features in this calendar software, we noticed that the preview isn't in real time. This means that you must make the changes and then wait for an moment while the alterations update.
If you don't like the edits you've made with this calendar software, you can cancel the action. It would be nice to see the changes as you make them so you can adjust your images more accurately and quickly. Although this calendar software has many tools, if you need advanced editing assistance, you may want to use a separate, more robust application before uploading your image to Simply Calenders.
Printing Options
You can change the page layout from landscape to portrait. Through Simply Calenders, you can also select the size of margin you want. Choose whether you want to print one month at a time or an annual run. If you want to use your calendar on the internet, you can save it as a digital document and export it to your website or blog.
Simply Calenders is a fairly intuitive application. The tools are clearly marked. One of our favorite marked tools in this calendar software is the clone tool, which has the symbol of a sheep on it. Some of the tools are a little more difficult to use than others, but Simply Calenders offers a searchable user guide to help you understand how the tools work.
You can download Simply Calenders from the Skerryvore website in just a couple minutes. You can either download an EXE or ZIP file. This calendar software runs on Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP and Windows 2000.
This calendar software has an in-application user guide. The user's manual has an index and a search feature. You can also download the manual from the manufacturer's website. In addition to the manual, you can also access online help by going to the Skerryvore Software website and clicking on the user forum or FAQs.
Simply Calenders offers a lot more features than you'd probably expect to find at first glance. Although this software appears to be outdated by the look of its interface design, it will provide you with almost all the tools you'd expect to find in calendar software. Plus, it's compatible with Windows 7. You can edit your photos, choose from dozens of templates and adjust the settings quickly and easily with Simply Calenders.
