Here is a fabulous New Year gift to you. A free 2025 Calendar Excel Template with built-in Activity planner. This is a fully dynamic and 100% customizable Excel calendar for 2025.
- See the calendar for entire year in a single view
- Dynamic any month calendar with detailed plan view
- Beautifully formatted and ready to print 12 month calendar view
- Automatic updation of holidays, weekends and activities
- Snapshot of upcoming activities
- Fully customizable – start on any day, any weekend, custom holidays
- Optimized for screen and print outs
Click the below button to download the free 2025 calendar template.
Compatibility
This calendar is compatible with Excel 365. It uses modern dynamic formula techniques to automatically generate the calendar, planner and month views.
If you have an older version of Excel (such as 2019 or 2016, 2013) then please use this alternative version.
How to use the 2025 Calendar Workbook?
The calendar & planner file has 4 tabs.
- Calendar tab: See the 12-month calendar view + upcoming activities in this page. It also highlights any holidays, weekends and planned activities on the calendar in a different color.
- Any month tab: This page lets you see the calendar for any specific month in a detailed view. You can change the month from cell C3 and the calendar updates automatically. The calendar shows date, any activities planned in a neat grid view.
- Printable 12 Month Calendar: This tab presents an elegant and ready-to-print 12 month calendar. You can print it or save this as PDF to generate all the 12 pages instantly. The colors and fonts are also fully customizable.
- Planner tab: Use this tab to set up your activities. Whatever items you list here will automatically show up on the calendar & any month tabs.
- Customizations tab: Do you want to change the way your week begins? Need to add some holidays or change the icons? Use the customizations tab.
How is this calendar made?
The calendar workbook has two main components.
- Calendar
- Planner
Calendar Generation
To generate the calendar, I am using the dynamic array functionality of Excel 365. We can use the SEQUENCE function to create all the dates in any given year.
For example, =SEQUENCE(365,,DATE(2025,1,1)) generates all the 365 dates in the year 2025.
I then used the same logic to generate monthly calendars for all the 12 months and adjusted them based on the week start option.
Once the monthly calendars are generated, then I highlighted the weekends, holidays and activities using conditional formatting.
Activity Planner
You can set up any number of activities in the planner table. I am then using FILTER function to filter out the activities for a given day and show them next to the calendar date.
Also, if “highlight activities” is enabled, then I am highlighting the calendar cells in a different color.
In the 12-month calendar view, I am showing upcoming 10 activities using FILTER function too.
Interactive any month calendar page:
We use the same logic as above, but limit it to a selected month (with data validation drop-down) to show the calendar for any specific month. Here is the calendar for August 2025.
Know more about these calculations
If you want to learn more about the calculations and set up of this workbook, please refer to these articles + videos.
- Dynamic array functions in Excel – introduction to FILTER, SEQUENCE etc.
- Conditional formatting to highlight values in Excel
- Data validation to select a month in Excel cell
- Excel tables – How to create a simple tracker in Excel
- Video: How to use FILTER function in Excel
Previous year calendars – 2024 Calendar, 2023 Calendar, Free Excel templates & files
14 Responses to “Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability”
I think the virtue of pie charts is precisely that they are difficult to decode. In many contexts, you have to release information but you don't want the relationship between values to jump at your reader. That's when pie charts are most useful.
[...] link Leave a Reply [...]
Chandoo,
millions of ants cannot be mistaken.....There should be a reason why everybody continues using Pie charts, despite what gurus like you or Jon and others say.
one reason could be because we are just used to, so that's what we need to change, the "comfort zone"...
i absolutely agree, since I've been "converted", I just find out that bar charts are clearer, and nicer to the view...
Regards,
Martin
[...] says we can Group Smaller Slices in Pie Charts to Improve Readability. Such a pie has too many labels to fit into a tight space, so you need ro move the labels around [...]
Chandoo -
You ask "Can I use an alternative to pie chart?"
I answer in You Say “Pie”, I Say “Bar”.
This visualization was created because it was easy to print before computers. In this day and age, it should not exist.
I think the 100% Bar Chart is just as useless/unreadable as Pies - we should rename them something like Mama's Strudel Charts - how big a slice would you like, Dear?
My money's with Jon on this topic.
The primary function of any pie chart with more than 2 or 3 data points is to obfuscate. But maybe that is the main purpose, as @Jerome suggests...
@Jerome.. Good point. Also sometimes, there is just no relationship at all.
@Martin... Organized religion is finding it tough to get converts even after 2000+ years of struggle. Jon, Stephen, countless others (and me) are a small army, it would take atleast 5000 more years before pie charts vanish... patience and good to have you here 🙂
@Jon .. very well done sir, very well done.
good points every one...
I've got to throw my vote into Jon's camp (which is also Stephen Few's camp) -- bars just tend to work better. One observation about when we say "what people are used to." There are two distinct groups here (depending on the situation, a person can fall in either one): the person who *creates* the chart and the person who *consumes* the chart. Granted, the consumers are "used to" pie charts. But, it's not like a bar chart is something they would struggle to understand or that would require explanation (like sparklines and bullet graphs). Chart consumers are "used to" consuming whatever is put in front of them. Chart creators, on the other hand, may be "used to" creating pie charts, but that isn't an excuse for them to continue to do so -- many people are used to driving without a seatbelt, leaving lights on in their house needlessly, and forwarding not-all-that-funny anecdotes via email. That doesn't mean the practice shouldn't be discouraged!
[...] example that Chandoo used recently is counting uses of words. Clearly, there are other meanings of “bar” (take bar mitzvah or bar none, for [...]
[…] Grouping smaller slices in pie chart […]
Good article. Is it possible to do that with line charts?
Hi,
Is this available in excel 2013?