Questions, answered

AnuCal is a visual annual calendar app for seeing, shaping, and remembering your year. You plan with color-coded events and anchors, mark days with emoji stamps and simple notes, then share or print the result.

A year canvas is the idea behind AnuCal: one continuous view of the whole year, where plans, memories, important days, and open space sit together — instead of only today, this week, or this month.

Regular calendars are built for daily schedules, meetings, and exact times. AnuCal is built for the long view: all-day and multi-day plans, timed Google Calendar context shown as counts or chips with Premium, annual rhythms, and lightweight life logging — so you can see the whole year at once.

No. AnuCal is designed to complement your daily calendar, not replace it. Google Calendar is great for daily schedules, meetings, and exact times, while AnuCal helps you see the full shape of your year.

AnuCal is useful for anyone who wants to see the whole year clearly. It works well for personal planning, creators, students, families, communities, teams, and anyone who wants a lightweight way to remember what happened throughout the year.

Yes. AnuCal is useful for seeing busy seasons, open space, important dates, and long-term rhythms. It is not a task manager, but it helps you understand the shape of your time.

Start with anchors: the dates that shape your year. Trips, birthdays, deadlines, launches, holidays, exams, events, and important personal milestones are all good places to begin.

You do not need to add everything at once.

Yes. AnuCal is useful for launches, deadlines, production windows, workshops, campaigns, events, and busy seasons. It helps you see when work is clustering and when you may need more space.

Yes. You can use AnuCal for travel, birthdays, family events, routines, goals, rest days, and important life moments. It is designed to help personal plans and memories live in the same year view.

Yes. Events you can edit can repeat weekly, every 2 weeks, monthly, quarterly, or every N days. Set the number of occurrences, and each occurrence appears in the year you are viewing.

Repeating events also appear on shared and published calendars and are expanded into one row per occurrence in event CSV exports.

Yes. Each month has a Sometime strip for plans that belong to that month but have no day yet. Point at a month and click the lightbulb by its name, or click the + at the end of a strip that already has items. You can also switch Date to Sometime in an event's panel, for a new event or one you already have.

If you don't see the lightbulb: with a mouse, it only appears while the pointer is over that month. Or create an event as usual and switch its Date to Sometime. On a calendar you can't edit, such as one shared with you to view only, nothing can be added, so the lightbulb for adding doesn't appear.

When you know the day, drag the item onto it and it becomes an ordinary event. On a touch screen, open the item and give it a day instead.

Sometime works on every plan. On Free, each item counts as one of your 30 events. Sometime items appear in your calendar and in calendars you share, but not on published pages, in CSV export, or when the calendar is overlaid on another one.

Yes. You can create custom categories, choose colors, and filter categories on or off. This helps you focus on specific parts of your year, such as work, travel, family, study, or memories. Category colors color your events, not the background of the day cells. Stamps use them too if you turn on Category Colors under Stamps in Display Options.

Yes. Archive the category. Its events and stamps are kept, but the category stays hidden from the calendar, category picker, and published pages until you restore it.

Switch the year view to Rolling. Open the calendar menu and choose Year Range, or open it from the bottom of the year picker. Under Mode, select Rolling, then use Start month to begin from This month, Previous month, 2 months ago, or 3 months ago.

The view moves forward by itself each month, so the months ahead stay in view. If you want the year to always start from a specific month, such as April or September, use Fiscal mode instead. Year Range is set per calendar, and only the calendar owner can change it.

Yes. AnuCal shows 12 months at a time, and you can move that window. Switch years from the year picker, or slide the 12 months forward or back one month at a time: hover the month labels for the arrows, or press Cmd/Ctrl with an arrow key. Add Shift to move a whole year. Today, Reset, or Esc brings the saved view back.

By default you can reach last year through three years ahead. The calendar owner can widen that range under Year Range, in the Span section.

Yes. Open the calendar menu and choose Year Range, then select Fiscal under Mode and choose any start month. This suits fiscal years, school years, and project cycles, and a fiscal year can be labeled by the year it ends.

If you only want the next 12 months from today, use Rolling instead. Year Range is set per calendar, and only the calendar owner can change it.

Yes, in the Fixed Week layout, which lines up weekdays in columns across every month. Open the calendar menu and choose Display Options. Under Layout, select Fixed Week, then set Week starts on to Monday. The Week starts on setting appears only while Fixed Week is selected.

Fixed Week is a Premium feature. The default Date Grid layout starts each month on the 1st, so it has no week start to change. Week numbers follow the ISO standard, where weeks start on Monday. Display options are set per calendar, and only the calendar owner can change them.

Yes, with the Fixed Week layout. The default Date Grid layout starts each month on the 1st, while Fixed Week lines up weekdays in columns across every month. There is also a Vertical layout that shows months as columns with days flowing downward.

Open the calendar menu and choose Display Options to switch layouts. Fixed Week and Vertical are Premium features, and Vertical is currently in beta.

You can show ISO week numbers, mark custom days off, fade past dates, and add month or quarter accent colors. You can also switch between light and dark mode, and tune accent strength separately for each.

Accent colors (Color Tone) tint your days off, month labels, and the empty cells around each month. Each option uses a fixed set of colors, so you can't pick your own. Weekdays that aren't days off keep a plain background, white in light mode and near-black in dark mode, and it can't be changed.

Emoji stamps are lightweight markers you can place on specific days. Use them for moods and memories, but also for project milestones, holidays, birthdays, launches, travel, rest days, or any day you want to make easier to spot in the year view.

One-line notes are short daily notes attached to a specific date. They are designed for quick context, not long journal entries.

Example: Sep 21 · 🌧️ Slow day

Yes. Premium lets you build a custom stamp palette for quick access. You can also place the stamp lane at the top or bottom of a day cell and choose category colors or a neutral style for stamp chips.

Not exactly. You can use it to remember your year, but it is lighter than a diary. A small note, emoji, color, or anchor can be enough.

If you want to write long daily entries, a dedicated journal app may be better. If you want to remember what happened without maintaining a heavy journal, AnuCal is a good fit.

No. AnuCal works even if you only mark the days that matter. The goal is not to create pressure, but to leave enough traces that you can look back and remember the year.

Anything that helps you understand the year later. A project milestone, a holiday, a launch, a family event, a good meal, a hard week, a trip, a rest day, or a small win can all be worth marking.

Yes. AnuCal brings in all-day events from Google Calendar so you can see them in the context of the whole year, on every plan.

Events with a start time can be shown as well, as a per-day count or as chips on the day. That part is included in Premium.

Imported events keep the colors from Google Calendar, including calendar colors and individual event colors.

There is no direct Apple Calendar connection yet, but you can bring an iCloud calendar in through Google. In the Calendar app on your Mac, hover over the calendar in the sidebar and click the share icon next to its name, tick Public Calendar, then copy the webcal:// link it shows. Anyone with that link can view the calendar, so use it for calendars you are comfortable sharing.

In Google Calendar, next to "Other calendars" choose + and then From URL, and paste the link exactly as it is. The calendar then appears in AnuCal under Google Calendar Sync, where you can tick it to show it on the year view.

The calendar comes in read-only, and Google refreshes subscribed links on its own schedule, so a new event can take a few hours to appear.

AnuCal can show timed events that come from Google Calendar, so you can see which days are loaded and which events run at the same time. Clicking a date lists that day in time order. This is included in Premium.

It does not create or edit timed events. AnuCal is focused on annual perspective, all-day events, multi-day plans, and life logging, and is not designed to replace your daily schedule.

For timed meetings and reminders, continue using your regular calendar.

No. AnuCal brings in Google Calendar events for annual viewing only, all-day and timed alike. They are read for display and are not stored in the AnuCal database.

For editing and timed scheduling, continue using Google Calendar directly. Events you create in AnuCal itself can be edited and deleted there as usual.

Yes. You can publish a read-only year view at a public link or embed it in a website, wiki, or Notion. Viewers do not need an AnuCal account. This works well for school calendars, community schedules, event calendars, project timelines, and public annual plans.

You can also invite specific people privately by email. Viewers are free and unlimited on every plan; inviting an editor requires Premium.

Premium owners can upload and trim a calendar image for published pages and social previews.

Public URL sharing is read-only. People with a public link can see the calendar, but they do not get edit access.

Premium calendar owners can invite 1 editor per calendar with full content edit access. Member management, public publishing, and ownership controls stay owner-only.

Yes. Any calendar owner, including on the Free Plan, can invite people by email as viewers. Viewer members can see the shared calendar inside AnuCal, and there is no limit on how many you invite.

Editor access requires Premium, is limited to 1 editor per calendar, and is meant for trusted collaborators who should be able to edit calendar content.

Yes. Premium owners can create up to 5 owned calendars.

Yes. Premium owners can duplicate a calendar to start a new year or project. The copy includes events, categories, stamps, settings, palettes, and images.

Yes. Overlay lets you show another calendar's events behind your own. The layer is read-only, keeps its own colors, and is faded back so your plans stay in front.

Overlay choices are private to you and do not appear on shared or published calendars.

Yes. When a calendar is public, you can copy its iframe code into a website builder, Notion, wiki, or another site. The embedded view removes the app navigation and keeps a subtle AnuCal footer.

You can print the whole year, download events as CSV in a calendar-import format, and export stamps as CSV with emoji, notes, and categories for spreadsheets or backup.

Repeating events are exported as one row per occurrence. Free includes basic print/export, while Premium adds the print-ready yearly layout.

Yes. The "See the demo" button opens a demo year so you can see how AnuCal works before building your own calendar. No sign-up is needed to try the demo.

Not to try the demo. Demo changes are not tied to an account, so create or sign in to an account when you want to keep and manage your own calendar.

Yes. Account deletion is available from account settings.

Choose Send feedback in your user menu at the top right, or email support@anucal.com. Tell us what you want to change and why; it helps us decide what to build next.

Yes. AnuCal is responsive and works on smartphones, so you can check your year, confirm plans, or add a quick stamp while you are away from your desk.

The annual view keeps a layout close to the desktop experience, so a larger screen is still more comfortable for reviewing the whole year at once. You can also add AnuCal to your phone home screen, so it opens from an app-like icon.

Yes. AnuCal has a Free Plan with up to 30 events and 5 categories, which is enough to try the annual view and use it for lightweight personal planning.

The Free Plan also lets you use core features such as emoji stamps, one-line notes, public read-only sharing, private sharing with unlimited viewers, and basic print/export. When AnuCal becomes part of your regular planning workflow or you need an editor, check the Pricing page to choose the plan that fits your use.