Those clever littler personal organizers with the neat-o pages of all sorts are expensive. Especially when you go to buy refills and realize how much the whole package costs per year. Fortunately, you can print your own using free templates at a fraction of the cost.
Printable planner pages
While you’re still paying for paper and ink, this still tends to be cheaper than the pre-printed options in the store. You also get to make only the pages you need, in just the quantity you need, so you’re never paying for extra pages. And you never have to dash off in a panic to an office supply store because you’re about to run out.
There are a number of internet sources for free page templates you can print right from your computer.
DIY Planner offers free templates you can print yourself, and they’re gorgeous. There are several different styles to mix and match – calendars, contact info pages, several types of to do lists and action item lists, note pages, journal pages, pages for logging your exercise and calories burned… oh, just everything. You can even print off a receipt envelope, using a regular envelope.
The templates are designed for A5 paper or “Classic”, which is half a US letter size page. If you don’t have a planner, you can print “2-up” versions, which means two pages will appear side by side on your landscape oriented sheet of paper. You can trim these with a paper cutter, or you can just hole punch them into a three-ring binder and use them horizontally.
Printable Planners is very similar to DIY Planner, offering a nice variety of planner pages for you to print. The main difference is that DIY Planner uses a lot of grayscale, which makes their pages prettier (at least to some people), but more expensive to print. Printable Planners pages use no grayscale. They’re very simple, but they look nice and get the job done.
Vertex42 offers just two templates, but what’s cool about these is that they’re in Excel format instead of a pdf. That means you can customize them on your computer before you print, to get exactly the planner sheets you want.
Rolling your own
And that brings us to another point, which is: you can make your own in Excel, Word or Power Point. You can start with a planner page template from Microsoft (some templates will work with non-Microsoft software, like Open Office) and tweak it to your heart’s content. This is a great solution if you normally have trouble finding quite the planner pages you want.
More tips
If you find printing your own pages works for you, you may want to invest in a paper cutter – they can be very affordable, and come in handy for a lot of crafts and business uses. These make quick work of cutting “2-up” sheets in half – and they also make the edges look professional to anyone who gets a look at your planner.
You may also want a hole punch. You can get a single hole punch almost anywhere for almost nothing, or you may want an adjustable three-hole punch – set it to match one set of holes on for a 6-ring binder, then scooch it over for the next set (using a pre-punched page as your guide), and you’re done.
Find more in Do It Yourself
Updated: May 14, 2012
Copyright: January 5, 2010
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