How to make a dated digital planner (without dating 365 pages by hand)

Undated planners are easy to sell and easy to make. Dated planners sell well in the months before a new year, because buyers want something ready to use on January 1. The catch is that every page needs the right date and every calendar needs the right weekday offset. Here is a workflow that keeps it manageable.

1. Start from an undated template

Design one of each page type: month, week, day and notes. Leave space where the date will go and make the calendar grid a fixed 6x7 or 5x7 layout. Export it as a PDF from Canva, Keynote, Affinity or Procreate.

2. Decide the edition rules up front

• Year: the calendar year, or an academic year (for example August to July).
• Week start: Monday or Sunday. Many sellers list both as separate files, which doubles the work if done by hand.
• Leap years: 2028 has a February 29. Your page count and links change.
• Which pages repeat: one day page per day, or a week-on-two-pages layout.

3. Work out the page order

A common order is cover, year at a glance, then for each month: month page, its weeks, its days. Write it down as a numbered list before you generate anything; the links in the next step depend on these page numbers.

4. Add the dates

By hand, this means typing each date on its page and the day numbers into each month grid, with the first day placed under the right weekday. A quick sanity check: January 1, 2027 is a Friday, so in a Monday-start grid it sits in the fifth column.

5. Link everything

Every day cell should open its day page, every tab its section, and prev/next should step through the year. See how to hyperlink a digital planner for the full process.

6. Test before you list

Check the weekday of the 1st in every month against a real calendar, tap the first and last day of each month, and run the free link checker for broken destinations. Then open it in GoodNotes and Notability.

Doing it in minutes instead

Steps 3 to 5 are the repetitive part, and they repeat next year. In Folory you upload the undated template, tag the page types, place the date text and the calendar grid once, pick the year and week start, and export. Changing the year or switching to Sunday start is a new export, not a new project. Everything runs in your browser; the PDF never uploads.