Simplicity. We can all use a little more of it, wouldn’t you agree?!
Well, today I have a tutorial video that will make the creation of your music studio calendar from year to year as simple as one keystroke and…
Voila! Your new calendar will be created.
I’m not exaggerating. No, seriously. It’s true.
The Calendar
Before I turn your studio management world upside down, let me show you the calendar we’re about to create.
Besides learning how to create this calendar, you might even learn a few Excel hacks along the way. Maybe you can use what you learn to create your own version!
Before we get into the video, let’s talk briefly about the best time of year and format for distributing calendars.
Calendar Distribution
April seems to be the perfect time of year for calendar distribution. I’ve never had families ask about summer lessons or next year’s calendar any earlier.
Some studios I’ve heard put the information out in January and that’s great if you can, especially if you are a music school or have multiple teachers. I’ve tried that but am personally never ready to think about summer or the following year that early. Thus, both the calendar for Summer lessons (June through mid-August) and the following school year (August through May) are presented to my families in April.
The studio calendar is made available to my families in two formats. First, a downloadable PDF version is made available in three ways: I email it directly to all families, it’s accessible from the menu of the studio website and is included as a link in all monthly newsletters. A printed version is placed in the student’s binders (generally on the back cover) and is also posted on the studio bulletin board.
OK, that wasn’t too much to cover. Let’s get to the nitty-gritty.
Are you ready to have your mind blown?
Creating a Studio Calendar in Excel [Video]
A few tips to prepare you for the video.
- Open a blank Excel spreadsheet and do all the steps as you watch the video.
- Be prepared to pause the video if needed. (The space bar is a quick way to pause and restart videos).
- If at all possible, watch this video on one device and have your Excel sheet open on another so you don’t have to flip back and forth on the same screen. If you don’t have two monitors or a large enough desktop to split the screen, navigate to the video via your iPad (it will likely be too small to follow along on a phone), and work on your Excel sheet from your desktop or laptop.
- So you can see it even easier, view the video on an expanded screen by clicking on the little + symbol in the right-hand corner of the video.
- In case your video looks a little fuzzy, you might need to change the video quality. In order to see all the details, I would recommend setting it to 720p HD. The next three screenshots will show you how to change this setting.
Time to roll…view the video below or click here to view on YouTube.
To making life easier! 🙂
10/31/2019 UPDATE
After a couple of readers have contacted me with questions since this post went up.
I eventually hope to re-record the video to clarify a few things, but until then, here are a few minor updates/fixes to what you see in the video.
First of all, I apologize that I did not remove the sound of my cursor clicking on the video. I thought it might help you follow along with what I was doing easier but I’ll admit, it gets just a tiny bit annoying.
5:30 – I mistakenly say to type “left colon” but I meant “left parenthesis” (if you’re watching, you’ll see me type the correct thing, but simply verbalize it incorrectly. I also accidentally say “number symbol” when I meant “dollar sign”
4:30 – At this point in the video we are setting the format of a cell so that it will only display a partial wording of the month. (When you get there, this will make sense). In the video, I state to go under “custom” and find the formatting rule that looks like this: [$-en-US]mmm;@
There is a simpler way. While you are still under “custom”, in the box under “Type” you can type in your own format code. Type in:
mmm: This format will get you the month formatting of
Jul
Aug
Sep
Oct
mmmm: This will get you the month formatting of
July
August
September
October
For more tips like these, you might consider checking out:
App-Land Madness: How I Organize My Devices
Tidy Teacher Tips: End of Semester Reset
File Fever: Organizing Student Files
