Year Wheel: user guide

Plan your year on one page. Year Wheel draws your year as a wheel, with one ring for each main area of work: for example Research, Education, Department and Lab. You see the whole year at a glance, keep it up to date as plans change, and share it as a file, a printout or a calendar.

It is one file, yearwheel.html, that you open in your web browser. There is nothing to install, no account and no server. Your wheel is saved in a file on your own computer, and nothing is sent over the internet.

Contents

1. Getting started
2. Reading the wheel
3. Adding and editing events
4. Rings and settings
5. List and change log
6. Reviewing each quarter
7. Saving and sharing
8. Importing and exporting
9. Printing
10. Tips and questions

1. Getting started

What you need: the file yearwheel.html and a web browser. Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge work best, because they can save your changes straight back into your file. Safari and Firefox work too, but save each change as a new copy in your Downloads folder (see section 7).

1. Put yearwheel.html somewhere you can find it again, for example in a folder for your team.
2. Open it: double-click it, or right-click it and choose Open With > Google Chrome.
3. To look around first, click Open and choose demo-department-2026-27.json, a demo wheel with fictional events.
4. To start your own wheel, click New and choose a template:

Give the wheel a title and choose the day your year starts: 1 January for a calendar year, or for example the first day of the autumn term for an academic year. Template events are placeholders marked “(edit me)”. Their dates are examples, not your institution’s real dates.

5. Click Save and choose a name, for example research-group-2027.json.

The .json file is your wheel. Keep it with yearwheel.html, for example in a shared folder. Next time, open yearwheel.html and click Open to load it.

The app is available in English and Svenska. Use the language menu in the toolbar. The choice is your own and is remembered by your browser; it does not change the wheel file, so colleagues can use different languages on the same wheel.

2. Reading the wheel

• Months run clockwise around the edge like a clock, with January at the top right. An academic year that starts in August simply begins further round, at about 8 o’clock. (To put the first month of your year at the top instead, change Top of the wheel under Settings.) Small numbers outside the months are week numbers (can be turned off).
• Rings hold your areas of work. The first ring is the outermost. The legend at the bottom shows which colour is which ring.
• Spans (several days, such as a course or a project phase) are arcs. Milestones (one day, such as a deadline or a meeting) are diamonds.
• Labels sit on the arc when there is room, otherwise outside the wheel with a thin line to the event.
• Q1 to Q4 mark the quarters; the thin inner band shows your study periods (P1 to P4).
• The red line is today.
• Events marked done have a tick (✓) and a lighter colour. Cancelled events are hollow with a struck-through label, so you can still see that something was planned. A moved event shows a faint outline where it used to be.

Point at any event (or move to it with the Tab key) to see its details: dates, times, status, owner and notes. Click it to edit it.

3. Adding and editing events

Click Add event, or click an empty spot on a ring to add an event at that date and ring. Click an existing event to edit it. The editor opens on the right.

• Title, Ring, Owner and Notes are free text.
• Kind: a milestone is one day; a span has a start and an end date.
• Time:
  • a milestone is a whole day or has a time from and to, for example a team day from 09:00 to 17:00;
  • a span is whole days, has the same hours each day (for example a course 09:00 to 16:00 on Monday to Wednesday), or runs from the first day to the last day (for example a retreat from lunch on Monday to lunch on Wednesday).
• Status: planned, moved, done or cancelled.
• Repeats: choose every year for things that come back, such as an annual report. They then appear in every year of the wheel.

Click Apply to save the change to the wheel (remember to Save the file afterwards).

Moving and cancelling always ask for a reason. When you change the date or time of an event, or click Cancel event, you are asked why. The reason is kept in the change log, so everyone can see later what changed and why. History at the bottom of the editor shows the changes to that event. Delete removes an event completely (this is also logged).

Times are in the wheel’s time zone, shown under the time fields. It is set the first time you enter a time and can be changed under Settings.

4. Rings and settings

Click Rings to:

• rename a ring or change its colour;
• move a ring outwards or inwards with the arrows;
• show or hide a ring with the box in front of it. A hidden ring is kept, with all its events, but is left out of the wheel, prints and images; the other rings get more room. Its events stay in the List, change log, reviews and calendar export;
• delete a ring (you choose whether its events move to another ring or are deleted);
• add a ring. Up to 6 rings are allowed; 3 to 4 read best.

Click Settings for the wheel as a whole:

• Wheel title and Owner, shown in the centre of the wheel.
• Year starts on and Number of years. A wheel can cover several years, for example a PhD. Use the year selector in the toolbar to switch between years.
• Q1 starts in: the month your first quarter starts.
• Top of the wheel: January (the default) or the first month of your year.
• Time zone for event times.
• Show quarter boundaries, Show week numbers, Show study periods.
• Text size on the wheel (70% to 150%) for all labels, month names, the title and the legend.
• Event colours and Ring background (how solid the colours are). 100% is exactly the colour chosen for the ring. On strong backgrounds, events get a thin outline and labels switch to white or black so they stay readable.
• Study periods: enter your own dates for P1 to P4 (template dates are only examples).

All of these are saved in the wheel file, so prints and exports look the same for everyone who opens it. Light or dark colours on screen follow your computer, or the ◐ button in the toolbar.

5. List and change log

Switch between Wheel, List and Change log in the toolbar.

• List shows every event in a table. Click a column heading to sort. Filter by text, ring, status or quarter, for example to see everything in the coming quarter. Click a title to edit. This is the quickest way to find things, and works well with the keyboard and screen readers.
• Change log shows every change with its date, what changed (before and after) and the reason. Below it is the list of quarterly reviews.

6. Reviewing each quarter

Plans change, so the wheel works best when you look at it regularly. When a new quarter starts, a blue banner says that it has not been reviewed yet. Click Start review (or Review quarter in the toolbar at any time).

The review goes through each event in the quarter, one at a time:

• Still planned: nothing changes.
• Move: pick new dates and give a reason.
• Cancel event: give a reason.
• Mark done: the event is finished.

At the end, enter your name and an optional note and click Stamp quarter as reviewed. The banner disappears until the next quarter starts. Remember to Save afterwards.

Quarters follow the “Q1 starts in” setting and are named after the year in which Q1 starts. With Q1 in September, September 2026 to August 2027 is 2026-Q1 to 2026-Q4.

7. Saving and sharing

• Save (Ctrl+S or Cmd+S) writes your changes to the file.
• Save as (Ctrl+Shift+S or Cmd+Shift+S) saves a new file under a name you choose. Later saves go to the new file.
• The top bar shows Unsaved changes until you save, and the browser warns you before closing.
• As a safety net, unsaved changes are also kept in your browser. If you close without saving, you are offered to restore them next time. This is only a backup: the .json file is your wheel.

Which browser?

Sharing: send or share the .json file. Anyone with yearwheel.html can open it. For a team, keep both files in a shared folder and agree who updates the wheel, so that two people do not save over each other’s changes.

8. Importing and exporting

Import (toolbar):

• Calendar file (.ics) from Outlook or Google Calendar. In Outlook: File > Save Calendar (or drag a calendar to the desktop on a Mac). In Google Calendar: Settings > Import and export > Export, then unzip. A dialog lists the events found: choose a ring for each, or one ring for all, and untick anything you do not want. Events already in the wheel start unticked, so importing the same file twice does not create copies. Meetings keep their times.
• Spreadsheet (.csv) from Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets or similar. See “The spreadsheet format” below. The import dialog lists any rows it could not read, with their line numbers.

Export (toolbar):

• Calendar file (.ics): send it to colleagues so they can add all events to Outlook or Google Calendar. Whole-day events become all-day entries; timed events become meetings at the right local time, even for colleagues in another time zone; spans with the same hours each day become a daily meeting; lunch-to-lunch spans become one continuous event.
• Spreadsheet (.csv): all events in a table you can open in Excel, edit, and import again. It uses exactly the format below, so a wheel can go out to a spreadsheet and back.
• SVG image: a sharp picture for documents and slides.
• PNG image: a high-resolution picture.

Exports and prints always use light colours, even if you use the dark theme on screen.

The spreadsheet format

The easiest start is Import > Spreadsheet template (.csv): it downloads a small example file with one row of each kind. Open it in Excel, replace the rows with your own, save it as CSV, and import it. A copy, year-wheel-import-template.csv, is also in the package.

The first row names the columns. Only title and start are required; the columns can be in any order, and empty cells are fine.

Examples of complete rows:

title;start;end;ring;status;start time;end time;timing;repeats;owner;notes
Budget draft;2027-02-01;2027-03-15;Department;planned;;;;;Head of department;
Board meeting;2027-04-12;;Department;planned;13:00;15:00;;;;
Course week;2027-03-02;2027-03-04;Education;planned;09:00;16:00;daily;;;
Writing retreat;2027-05-10;2027-05-12;Research;planned;12:00;12:00;continuous;;;Lunch to lunch
Annual report due;2027-02-26;;Department;planned;;;;yearly;;

Good to know:

• Commas, semicolons and tabs between columns all work. Files from the app use semicolons and start with a sep=; line, which tells Excel how to split the columns; you can leave it in.
• Text that itself contains a semicolon, comma, quote or line break must be in double quotes, which Excel does automatically.
• Swedish column names (titel, slut, starttid, sluttid, upprepas, ansvarig, anteckningar) and status words (planerad, flyttad, klar, inställd) are accepted too.
• Importing the same file again does not create copies: rows with the same title and start date as an existing event start unticked.

9. Printing

Use Export > Print A4 landscape or Print A3 landscape. The print dialog opens with the wheel sized to the page, with the title, year and print date at the bottom. A3 is best for busy wheels. To make a PDF, choose “Save as PDF” in the print dialog. To leave a ring out of the print, hide it under Rings first.

10. Tips and questions

Keyboard. Tab moves between events on the wheel; Enter opens one. N adds an event. Escape closes the open dialog, menu or editor. Ctrl/Cmd+S saves, Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+S saves as, Ctrl/Cmd+O opens.

The labels are crowded. Hide a ring you do not need right now, lower the text size, use A3 for printing, or use the List view for details.

I need bigger buttons and menus. Use your browser’s zoom: Ctrl or Cmd with + and -.

Where is my data? Only in your .json file (and, as a backup of unsaved changes, in your own browser). Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

Can two people edit at the same time? Not safely: the last one to save wins. Agree who updates the shared file, or keep one wheel per person and share exports.

Is my institution’s calendar built in? No. Templates contain example dates only. Enter your own study periods under Settings and your own dates for each event.

The file opened with a warning. The app checks files when it opens them and lists anything that looks wrong, for example an event without a valid date. Fix those events and save.

License

Copyright (c) 2026 Robert Tomkowski (rtom@kth.se). Released under the MIT License: you may use, copy, change and share Year Wheel freely; it is provided as is, without warranty. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

Developed with the assistance of Claude Code (Anthropic).