Generic calendar --> Date-pegged calendar

October 11, 2012 11:23 AM

Calendar scripting to create a generic Week 1-10 structure and then mapping the generic to actual calendar dates. What tools can I use for this?

The scenario is this: I'm creating a 10-week generic course calendar (like a syllabus, for example) where there are always things that occur at the same points in certain weeks (assignments, tests, deadlines). But because the course start- and end-dates are always different, there are no actual dates attached--all assignments, for example, are listed as 'Week 4, Day 4' or 'Week 6.'

So what tools can I use to create generic calendars and then input a start date and have the generic calendar (with all the mileposts, deadlines, etc. in the generic calendar) map onto a real calendar with actual dates? I also want to be able to save the generic calendars so I can redo this process later when the course runs again.

posted by yellowcandy to computers & internet (3 answers total)

I wrote a tool to do exactly this a few years ago. It's very, very basic, but it should work:

https://github.com/flymaster/CalendarMaker
posted by bowbeacon at 11:38 AM on October 11, 2012 [1 favorite]

Excel is good at this. Have the "start date" in a cell somewhere, and then each day after that is a calculated date relative to that start date.

(if the date is blank, [blank]+1 resolves to "1/1/1900", so if you also want your "undated" syllabus to still be pretty, you could create some conditional formatting where "date earlier than 1/1/2000 is white-on-white, or something)
posted by misterbrandt at 1:06 PM on October 11, 2012

I did something like this with OpenOffice macros in Calc (the spreadsheet). The spreadsheet was good for calendar layouts, too.
posted by amtho at 4:58 PM on October 11, 2012