I admit it. I’m sometimes a hard-copy junkie. For all the technological advancements we humans have achieved, and for all the high-tech gadgetry I’ve acquired through the years, good ol’ pen and paper still has a magical appeal.

That’s why I prefer real books to e-books. And I prefer personally handwritten greeting cards or letters rather than those mass-produced email greeting cards that have become popular of late.

Still, when it comes to personal information management, I’m all for automating things. I particularly dig Google Calendar (as is apparent with my fondness of GCal in posting here). But I also like taking a glance at a paper calendar whenever I find the need to quickly check dates and corresponding days of the week.

It’s a good thing I can actually come up with hard copies of any calendar I want, all from Google Calendar. By this I mean I can quickly generate a weekly calendar for plotting out my work week. Or I can print out a one-day calendar to plot out the day’s agenda.

Quick calendar printing

First thing one needs to do is to select a date range. We earlier talked about how to select date ranges quickly by simply dragging and dropping your cursor.

For instance, in this case I select a two week period from February 10th to 23rd.

So once you’ve selected the date range you prefer, you can select which calendars to include. This means you can include or exclude events on any one of your personal calendars or public calendars you have subscribed to or use to collaborate with.

Here I exclude everything except the Phases of the moon and AdSense public calendars (here’s how to add public calendars, in case you were wondering).

And I hit the Print button.

A window then comes up with a preview of the document I’m about to print. The printout lists the calendars included and even the time-zone used.

If I’m satisfied, then I hit the Print button which then leads us to the OS’s print window, from where you can choose a printer, print quality, and all sorts of options depending on your printer and OS.

What’s great is that I can save the calendar as a PDF for sharing with people offline. So I just click the Save As button and my browser downloads the calendars as a PDF. How thoughtful of Google!

I know printing is easy to take for granted in this day and age. But like any other application that uses paper, you will someday find a need to print out some material. In the case of dates, sometimes it’s easier to visualize dates and days when printed out in hard format rater than on a computer screen.

Happy printing.