Improving the Calendar: A Smarter Way to Visualize a Year
Sometimes, I just want to take a quick look at the upcoming year and see how busy I’m going to be. I don’t need to know the details of all my appointments, but I’d like to know where certain holidays fall, when I’m going to be traveling, how that matches up with big deadlines, and so on.
Unfortunately, most digital calendars don’t provide a year view. For instance, Google Calendar lets you look at a day, a week, four days (why?), and a month — but not an entire year. The last I checked, Outlook does the same (although with a more helpful five-day view, rather than four.)
When calendars do provide a year view, it’s usually just the “month view” for each of the 12 months, compressed onto a single page. For example, here’s the year view for Yahoo Calendar:
Oddly, Yahoo Calendar doesn’t seem to show events on this view — it’s simply a selector that takes you to the “week view” that you click on.
But even if you did see some sort of indication of booked events on this view, it wouldn’t be so easy to read. Events spanning multiple weeks or months would wrap too many times. And you’d have to look pretty hard to figure out which weekends were booked and which were open.
It’s not a terrible sin, but it’s not the most usable way to visualize a year’s events.
So what’s better? I’ve been searching for a couple years and the only really good visualization I’ve found so far is in an Outlook plugin from an Australian company called Planet Software. Their Outlook Year View plugin adds an option to a standard Outlook calendar that lets you see all your events in the following style.
I can’t speak for the plugin because I don’t use Outlook, but I love the way this visualization maps out each month’s events linearly. Stacking the months lets you take in the entire year in a comfortable left-to-right, top-to-bottom format. And staggering the months aligns all the weekends, so you can quickly see what’s still free.
The moral here is that even something so familiar as a calendar can be improved upon. Tufte would be proud.
My name is Amit Asaravala. I'm an Internet technologies consultant & Web developer located in the San Francisco Bay Area. I specialize in helping organizations build great Web sites on open source technologies.
Awesome :) Thanks for bringing this up. Tufte would indeed be happy to see his principles realized and the quest still continuing for excellent visual data storytelling.