I spend most of my time at the office dealing with Balsamiq. As good as Balsamiq is to portray quick-n-dirty sketches of user interfaces, oftentimes you end up trying to redo one of their components because the quick-n-dirty solution just wouldn't help you tell the story to your customers. This is the case of the calendar, which happens to be stuck on February 2008 since... err... February 2008?[caption id="attachment_82" align="aligncenter" width="96"]
Balsamiq OTS Calendar Control[/caption]The problem that I face often while dealing with time-based views is the ability to change the date from one day to another during a walkthrough with the client, and for that purpose Balsamiq's calendar is not quite useful. For a while, I was trying different ways to make the calendars, using Labels and Panels to link between the .bmml files and all of them ended up in a nasty nested groups that would be very difficult to update, until I stumbled upon the wonderful Table component.The Table component in Balsamiq is feature rich, it allows you to do a lot of stuff if you know Balsamiq's markup, the problem now is to type the markup easily every time you are dealing with a view, for example, in order to get this:[caption id="attachment_83" align="aligncenter" width="181"]
Table Calendar View using Balsamiq's Markup[/caption]I would need to write something like this:*Mo* *Tu* *We* *Th* *Fr* *Sa* *Su*
-26- -27- -28- -29- -30- -31- [1](uno)
2 3 {color:blue}4{color} 5 6 7 *8*
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 [21](dos) 22
23 24 25 [26](tres) 27 28 29
30 -1- [-2-](asd) -3- -4- -5- -6-And as you can probably imagine, changing the parameters consistently among different wireframes could become a nightmare easily.This is why I created the Balsamiq Excel 2 Calendar Table Generator, which allows you to pick which month (or consecutive 2 months) you want to see from what date, and it will automatically generate the markup for you.The Excel Spreadsheet allows you to select the current date, and the selected date arbitrarily, and it has the ability to provide a link to other wireframes just by typing the name of the files next to the date (in the Links tab).[caption id="attachment_88" align="aligncenter" width="300"]
Excel Screenshot of the Balsamiq Excel 2 Table Calendar Generator[/caption]Download the Balsamiq Excel 2 Calendar Table Generator here.Hope this is helpful for you as it has been for me. Happy wireframing.
