Calendar cells, done right
Publisher shipped a calendar wizard, and people used it for twenty years. Church calendars, school lunch menus, shift schedules. More than a thousand documents in our test library are calendars. Under the hood, every one of them is a table, and tables are unforgiving: one misplaced border or one wrong cell and the whole page reads as broken.
This week's update fixes the three things calendars need most.
Text lands in the right cell
A calendar table has a cell for each day. The engine now maps every piece of text to its own cell: over a hundred thousand cells across those documents. Before this fix, some day-led cells lost their binding and the text stacked up wrong. Now the "3" sits in the box for the 3rd, and "Bake sale" sits under it.
Two sizes in one cell
Look closely at a Publisher calendar and you'll see the trick: the day number is large, maybe 24 point, and the note under it is small, maybe 8 point, and both live in the same cell. The engine used to pick one size for the whole cell. Now it keeps both, in PDF, Word, and IDML alike.
The grid you drew, and only that
Some calendars show a full grid. Some shade the weekends. Some hide the grid entirely and let the day numbers float. The engine now draws exactly the lines and fills Publisher drew. It no longer invents a grid where the design didn't have one, and it no longer drops the shading on the header row.
If you have an old calendar in a .pub file, convert it now and check the cells. This is the part of the format we're most proud of this month.