Application/tool that will help me create and manage a calendar on the fly?

Drez

Hi all,

Long story short, I maintain a process calendar. It's a kludgy piece of shit that I manually built. It's untenable at this point and I am as afraid of it as the Hogwarts populace are afraid of Voldemort.

I am now tasked with updating it for the next year and frankly I'd rather wrestle a bear. It would involve me manually moving cells around.

I'm looking for a tool/app//MS Office plugin/whatever (preferably free but I'd pay at this point) which will enable me to:

a) Quickly throw together a business calendar
b) Graphically represent various workstreams and processes that overlap multiple days (e.g. a green bar wrapping 10 days for Process 1 from business day 1 through 10 and a pink bar in the same squares from BD 4 through 6 for Process 2).
c) Easy to update/not manual.

I could probably build something myself, but I just don't have the luxury of time. So...any recommendations?

Thanks. You'll be helping tremendonormously.

Iruka

Is there some function that Google calender lacks here? I feel like it covers these bases, and you may be able to use some If This Then That to automate some processes.

Drez

I'm leery of putting anything work-related into Google.

Also, I entirely forgot to mention this extremely important aspect of this: This calendar is something I have to be able to print out and distribute. I should have mentioned that, sorry. Think of it as a report...except it's a calendar. The goal isn't actually for us to manage our workload (though we do use it as a rough guide as to what needs to be done and when, at a high level) - it's primarily so we can send it to other people so THEY know what we are working on. Like "hey, look at all this shit we're doing."

Sorry, I realize I should have mentioned that in my OP.

Daenris

Since you mention MS Office, have you tried using the calendar in Outlook? It should cover all those bases, and while I haven't tried exporting them in order to send it to someone else, but I suspect that should be easy.

Iruka

Google actually puts out a pretty clean print version, and you can easily make different types of calendars and quickly toggle them on and off for printing. I do it to print off calendars for my fridge that just need birthdays and not my complicated work schedule.... but I digress.

Alternatively, I know of this:
http://scheduler-net.com/features.html

It, of course, would cost you 800 bucks. I'm sure there's a free app out there I just don't know of (So, I'm no longer being helpful if google can't be the answer haha.)

Edit: Its been so long since I used outlook that I forget its not the dinosaur that I used in 2005 anymore.

Drez

You've both been helpful and I appreciate the effort. I'll check out Outlook features.

Thanks!

Essee

I'm not entirely sure what-all features you're looking for from your description, but I know VueMinder lets you print stuff, and... well I THOUGHT the free version synced to Google Calendar and Outlook for easy syncing between machines, but from that feature list it looks like that might be restricted to the pay version. Anyway, I find it great for day-to-day use, and I know for a fact it lets you show events stretching over multiple days because I use that ability fairly often (though not in a business environment). You can easily set up events to repeat on specific days, have different colors for different categories, etc. I'm not dealing with it from the business side of things, so I don't know if it has everything you need (I don't see anything about automation, for example) but it's worth a look. Here is another, more comprehensive list of its features so you can see if it has what you need.