Use a digital planner on Windows 11

How digital planners work

Most digital planners are PDFs: hundreds of pages, a page for every day or week, often with tabs down the side that jump to a month when you tap them. Many are designed with iPad apps in mind, but the PDF itself works anywhere. On Windows, you need an app that lets you write on a PDF with a pen, keeps every page, and does not lag on a big file. That part Mementa does well.

The honest part: tabs do not jump

The tabs and buttons in a hyperlinked planner are links inside the PDF. Mementa shows them as part of the page, but it does not follow them, so tapping a tab does not jump anywhere. If tapping tabs is the main way you use a planner, know that before you buy.

What you get instead:

• Search. The words printed in the planner come across with it, as long as they are real text in the PDF rather than a picture of text. Search for March, or Week 12, or Sunday, and the result opens that page. See searching your notebooks.
• The page rail. Book Mode has thumbnails of every page along the bottom.
• Swipes to turn the page, and Book Mode to flip through spreads.
• Your place is remembered. Open the planner and it is on the page you left.

Pick a portrait planner

Every Mementa book shape is upright or square. A planner designed sideways, for a tablet held in landscape, still works, but its pages sit inside a taller page with space above and below. A portrait planner fills the page. If you are buying one for Mementa, choose the portrait version.

Two ways to plan in Mementa

Write through a whole planner PDF

1. Add the planner PDF to your shelf.
2. Open it. It reads as a document first, and a long planner opens on page one at once.
3. Tap the pencil. Mementa asks which book shape you want and preselects the closest one. A series suits most planners.
4. The planner becomes one of your notebooks, every page underneath your writing at full print resolution. Your original file is never changed.

Build your own from templates

Import a single weekly or daily page as a template, then apply it to each new page as you go. The dot grid paper is built in for a bullet journal style planner you draw yourself. Save any page you design as a template and reuse it all year.

Make it yours

• Planner stickers. Drop a sticker sheet into the Sticker Book and the stickers are peeled off for you. Load your planner chapters, Tabs, Labels, Icons, Washi, into this planner's sticker drawer. See sticker peeling.
• Highlight in translucent ink that leaves the planner's lines readable.
• Colors. Twenty one palettes, and the eyedropper takes the exact color of the planner's own accents so your ink matches.
• Typed lists. Add a text box for a to do list, or write beside it with your pen and watch it type itself.
• Lock the planner. Keep the template on a locked layer so nothing moves it while you write.

At the end of the year

Keep last year's planner on the shelf, stacked with the next one, and search it whenever you need to. Export it as a PDF, or order it as a printed book. A finished planner makes a surprisingly good keepsake. See printed books.

Questions