AssistUK

CalendarMaker

Open the app

Help and user guide

CalendarMaker makes calendars for Grid – to print, and to use every day on the communication device. It is free, works in the browser and needs no account. Everything you enter stays in your browser.

Open CalendarMaker User guide as PDF

What you get

From one set of choices, CalendarMaker creates up to three grid sets:

Every page uses the same 12 × 9 grid, like all AssistUK grid sets. Back, Start and My pages are always at the bottom left.

Your calendar in ten minutes

  1. Open CalendarMaker. On the first page, choose a template that fits – school, work, living with support or family.
  2. Choose the year, the country and the region. They decide the public holidays and school holidays.
  3. Enter birthdays and the people who come regularly – with a photo if you like.
  4. On the last step, press Create all … grid sets. The files are saved by your browser.
  5. In Grid, add the files under Grid Explorer → Add grid set.
  6. Press Save project. Next time you load the project file and carry on.
Everything on the right is a preview: tap the tiles – they read aloud and write, just like in Grid. METACOM, PCS and SymbolStix symbols only appear in Grid; the AssistUK symbols already show in the preview (see symbols).

Step 1: What for? Templates

Choose whether the calendar is to print, to use in Grid or both. “Both” gives you two grid sets from the same settings.

Step 1 with the three choices and four templates
Step 1: purpose, templates and the diary.

Templates are a quick start. They set views, weekly appointments and people for a typical situation:

School days
Timetable, morning circle, diary, holidays of your region.
Work and daily structure
For a workshop or a day centre: working week, meal plan, transport.
Living with support
“Who is coming today?”, meal plan, shopping, daily routine.
Family
Birthdays with “n more sleeps”, diary, wall calendar.

Entries marked “(example)” are there to be replaced. Everything can be changed afterwards. Below the templates you can add the diary as an extra grid set.

Step 2: Year and region

Country and region decide the public holidays; the language decides month and day names and all labels in the grid set. For many countries you can choose a region – then only the holidays that apply there are shown.

The language of the grid set can differ from the language of the app: for example, the app in English and the grid set in German.

The week can start on Monday, Sunday or Saturday. Week numbers (ISO) only exist when the week starts on Monday.

Step 3: Views

Switch on what the calendar should contain: year, month, week, day, morning circle. For the printed sheets you also choose the layout and landscape or portrait.

Step 3 with views, layouts, timetable, meal plan and n more sleeps
Step 3: views and layouts.
Timetable
One printed sheet for the whole school year: Monday to Friday, eight lessons.
Meal plan
One printed sheet for a week: breakfast, lunch, dinner and a shopping list. Print a fresh one each week.
n more sleeps
Each day page shows how many more sleeps there are until the next birthday, public holiday or start of the holidays – for example “3 more sleeps until Mia”. It is read aloud with the page. Choose how far ahead it counts: one week, two weeks or one month.
Morning circle
Three pages on the device (see using it).
Day page with the title Wednesday 10 March 2027 · 4 more sleeps until Mia
A day page: the title says how many more sleeps; “Anna is coming” is already entered.

Step 4: Appearance and symbols

Choose the weekday colours, a symbol set and, if needed, high contrast. For the wall calendar you can add your own photo for each month – without a photo, the month symbol of the chosen symbol set is used.

METACOM, PCS and SymbolStix: CalendarMaker contains none of these symbols and copies none. The grid set only contains a reference – the name of the symbol. Grid shows and prints it only if the symbol set is installed and licensed on the device. Otherwise the tile shows its text. Grid’s own symbols and “text only” work everywhere.
AssistUK symbols: AssistUK’s own symbols are put into the grid set as pictures. They need no licence and look the same on every device. Choose whether the pictures show a woman or a man, and the colours of skin, hair, clothes and eyes – Grid cannot change the colours of a picture later, so they are set when the grid set is made. Weekdays, months and clocks are signs without writing: a calendar sheet in the colour of the day that marks the day of the week or the month of the year – the same in every language. The pictures were drawn with AI and edited by AssistUK. A grid set with AssistUK symbols is larger, because the pictures are inside it.

Every symbol has been checked against the real library, never guessed. Where a symbol set has no fitting picture, the tile keeps its text – a wrong picture would be worse than none.

Step 5: Words and sentences

Everything that is written on the tiles or read aloud can be changed here – in the language of the grid set: morning circle, feelings, clothes, food, questions, the diary and the meal plan. Your changes are saved with the project.

The number of parts is fixed (six feelings = six tiles); only the text can be changed. Placeholders in curly brackets such as {name} or {n} must stay in the text.

Step 6: Special days and people

Special days are birthdays, anniversaries and fixed events. They appear with a picture on the month, week and day pages; with a year of birth the age is added (“Mia (11)”). You can import yearly entries from a calendar file (.ics).

Who comes? – people who come regularly: support workers, therapists, family. Enter the name, the weekdays, the time and a photo if you like (up to six people). They appear:

Weekly appointments (swimming on Tuesdays at 10:00) are entered on every matching day in the same way.

Step 6 with special days and the preview of the month
Step 6: special days, people, weekly appointments.
Photos are made smaller in the browser and saved without location data. Nothing is uploaded.

Step 7: Holidays

For many countries CalendarMaker knows the school holidays (source: OpenHolidays). Choose your holiday region. Add your own free days, for example a bridge day or a closed workshop. Holidays appear on their first day, with the end date. Please check the dates with the school before printing.

Step 8: Create and save

Press Create all … grid sets. Each grid set is built in your browser and checked against the rules of Grid before it is saved; a file that fails the check is not handed out.

Step 8 with three finished grid sets
Step 8: three grid sets, each “checked: 0 errors, 0 warnings”.

Save project stores a small file with all your settings, special days and photos. Keep it – with it you can change the calendar later or make next year’s.

Adding it in Grid

  1. Copy the .gridset files to the device with Grid (for example with a USB stick or by e-mail).
  2. In Grid, open Grid Explorer, choose Add grid set and select the file.
  3. The calendar opens on its start page: the year. The fonts come with Grid; there is nothing to install.
The grid sets are made for Grid – Grid 3 and Grid for iPad. So far they have been tested on Windows.

Using it on the device

Year, month, week, day

Start page = the year. Tap a month, then a day. The day page has 28 boxes for appointments. Add appointment opens the keyboard; Add to calendar writes the text into the day. Delete appointment removes the selected entry. The entries are stored in the grid set itself.

Month page with week numbers, weekday colours and holidays on the right
Month page: week numbers on the left, holidays of this month on the right.

Morning circle

Page 1: date, clock and weekday come live from the device. Time of day, weather, temperature and season are chosen – every tile writes a whole sentence into the message bar, and Speak all reads it aloud.

Morning circle page 1

Page 2: How do I feel? What shall I wear? Who is coming today? What is there to eat? The sentence keeps growing across the pages.

Morning circle page 2 with feelings, clothes, people and food

Questions about the day help to get ready for an appointment, a visit to the doctor or an outing: Where are we going? When do we leave? Who am I going with? How long will it take? I need a break.

Page questions about the day

Printing

Open the printable calendar in Grid, go to the sheet you want and print it with Grid’s print function (Print grids – current grid, selected grids or all grids). The printed sheets only show the calendar; the small grey links in the margin look like page numbers.

Printed meal plan for a week
The meal plan: seven days, three meals, a shopping list.

The diary

Tap a day, press Write entry, write, then Add to diary. With the writing aids switched on there are sentence starters and feelings and a page for looking back: sentence starters (“This was nice:”), a mood scale from great to bad and time words (“this week”). Go back to the keyboard and put the text into the diary from there.

Diary page looking back with mood scale

A number lock can be put in front of the diary. It is a door, not a safe: the numbers are readable in the file. It keeps others away on a shared device, but does not protect against someone who opens the file.

Next year

  1. Load your project file, change the year and check the special days.
  2. For the diary, choose the old diary file under “Also” – its entries come along.
  3. Create the grid sets again and add them in Grid.

Questions and problems

The tiles show text but no symbols.
The chosen symbol set is not installed or not licensed in Grid – or it has no picture for this tile. Check the symbol set in step 4.
The people in the pictures don’t look right.
With AssistUK symbols, choose woman or man and the colours in step 4, then make the grid set again. Grid cannot change the colours of a picture afterwards.
Grid takes a moment when the calendar is added.
The calendar for the device has a page for every day of the year. Grid analyses it once when it is added.
Does anything go over the internet?
Only loading: the page, the generator and the holiday tables come from the CalendarMaker server. Building the grid sets happens in your browser – your entries, names and photos are not sent anywhere.
Which languages?
At the moment CalendarMaker and its new content are available in English and German. More languages will follow.
Who can help?
AssistUK helps free of charge: assistuk.net/hilfe. For devices and Grid itself, please contact the supplier of the device first.