Thursday, October 23rd, 2014

Calendar Wizard in Word 2013 and Word 2016 – Yes!

Missing the Calendar Wizard in Word 2013? – no problem, here’s how to get it

Many years ago, Word had a wonderful Calendar Wizard that you could use to make calendar pages in Word. One really neat aspect of this Wizard was (and still is) that you can make calendar pages for any period of time – so you don’t have to wait till someone makes 2017 calendars for you to download – instead you can make your own and you can do it now! Hell you can make calendars for 2020 now if you want to really plan ahead!

In Word 2013 it might at first appear that the Calendar Wizard isn’t available – and it isn’t – that is, until you know how to make it accessible.

To start, download the WIZ file for the wizard from here: Microsoft Word Calendar Wizard Download for Word 2013 and Word 2016.

download link for Calendar Wizard for Word 2013 and Word 2016

Alternately, if you have an older version of Word on your computer, search for Calendar Wizard.wiz as you may have it on your computer somewhere already.

If you find a .cab file for the Calendar Wizard and if it is a zipped archive format file then you will need to open it. If double clicking it doesn’t launch an unzip program that can handle it, then download Express Zip File Compression as it can handle .cab files easily.

Extract the .wiz file (or copy it) to a folder of your choice or, better still, put it into your custom templates folder C:\Users\‹Username›\Documents\Custom Templates. If you’re downloading from the Dropbox link above then you have the .wiz file and you just need to move it into position.

If you are doing this, then change its name when you do so – calendar wizard.wiz is (and was) a good name for it. If you found the wiz file on your own drive, make a copy to this folder.

T’hen double click the .wiz file to launch it in Word. If you put it in your Custom Office Templates folder then you can launch it from inside Word 2013 by choosing File > New, click Personal to view your personal templates and click to run it from there.

You can view my YouTube video on downloading and running and using the Calendar Wizard here: https://youtu.be/0HlnXxYIr7k

Note: Post updated November 2016 to include a new download location which was valid at this time.

Note: Post updated September 2017 – it still works! And to add video link.

Thursday, November 7th, 2013

Convert text to a Microsoft Word table

Quickly turn text into a Microsoft Word table

It is possible to convert text from a Word document into a table.

However, to do so requires the text to be correctly laid out – if it is not, it is worth a few minutes work to reformat the text so it can be easily converted to a table.

To convert the text each column’s content needs to be separated by a single tab and you need to have a paragraph marker at the end of each line. To check your text is correctly formatted, click the Home tab and click the Show/Hide¶ button to see the tab marks in the document (they are small right pointing arrows).

Make sure there is only one tab marker between each item in the list. If you don’t have data for a particular column add two tab marks to indicate that one column is empty.

Click the Show/Hide¶ button again when you are done.

Select the list and choose Insert > Table > Convert Text To Table.

Word should automatically suggest the correct number of columns. From the Separate text at options select Tabs, set the AutoFit behavior to AutoFit to contents if the items are short like ours are and click Ok.

The text will be automatically placed in a new table ready for you to continue to work on it.

Helen Bradley