Here is a fabulous New Year gift to you. A free 2026 Calendar Excel Template with built-in Activity planner. This is a fully dynamic and 100% customizable Excel calendar for 2026.
- 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 2026 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(2026,1,1)) generates all the 365 dates in the year 2026.
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 April 2026.
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 – 2025 Calendar, 2024 Calendar, 2023 Calendar, Free Excel templates & files
17 Responses to “Custom Number Formats – Colors”
You are right, Chandoo. I was playing with the colour numbers last week and some of them don't appear different from each other. Others are totally different from yours.
@Duncan
Each version of Excel, post 2003, renders colors slightly differently
Different language versions may also have different default color palettes
Hello in french
excel 2010
colo1 = couleur1 = black
[couleur1]; [couleur2]; etc..
@Hui, thank you very much again for this great post.
However - under Excel 2007, Hungarian version your solution does not work with color names. I've tried both English and Hungarian names, but drops an error message "not valid formats"
Do you have any idea how to solve this issue?
thanks in advance
@Andras
Without a Hungarian version of Excel 2003 I don't think I can assist
Have you tried using the colour numbers? I couldn't get the names to work (despite using an english version of excel). but it did work with the numbers though. I left out the "u" and was easily able to produce burgundy using [color9]
Here a possible solution: find an English version of Excel, write there the formats using English names, then open the file in the Hungarian version and see the translation.
In Excel 2007 I can't get the colour names to work e.g Sea Green but the numbers do e.g color3 - colour3 does not work so I must bow to the country that has stolen my language (ha ha!)
Hey chandoo, nice Tip!
Wouldn't be easier just apply some conditional formatting for negative numbers and another for positive numbers? Or there's some cases that you can't do that?
Unfortunately the TEXT function doesn't color the cell as number formatting does.
Hi Hui,
Great post Sir, love the new way of formatting with color numbers.
I am using 2007, and it leads me to the last color number 56.
Thanks Hui.
[…] explains how to set up custom number formats with a wide array of […]
Thanks Hui - works a treat!
Thank you, very helpful.
Trying to figure out if it is possible to apply color only to a part of the cell?
E.g. I have a value formatted as Accounting with a currency symbol.
Those I find somewhat distracting though necessary. If I could make them less obtrusive by coloring them gray while the number would stay black, that would be great. Tried tinkering with the format string, but didn't get the desired result. Single color for complete cell value works, but coloring just part of it could not be achieved. Maybe somebody managed that?
Exactly what I was looking for - thank you!
colour in the Australian doesn't work - we have to go American and no problem.
I always thought is was 56 colours notice you have 57. Cool.
thanks
Analir Pisani
Customised Microsoft Office Training Specialist
Sydney - Australia
http://www.azsolutions.com.au
Thank You!