Group and compact variables I'm working on a menu calendar for a preschool. They have 8 different menus on rotation:
Summer 1, 2, 3, 4 and Winter 1, 2, 3, 4. It rotates every week like this: 
Sep - Jun menu
I want parents to be able to look up the menu of the day based on the date. For example on sep 26th the school serves 'Summer menu week 4'.
The calendar in the link is ok but I'd like to provide infos in a more compact way (this is a good example of what I mean, except it doesn't work in my case - two different menus end up in the same spot).
Anyway, I'm stuck trying to find a way to visualize data. Does anyone have a suggestion?
 A: Your existing design can be compressed by removing some redundancies and non-data. For instance, the menu number is indicated by both horizontal position and by a label for each day. And the week-ends can be removed or de-emphasized so the relevant data stands out better. Here's a more compact view of your design, using shared menu labels instead of repeated labels. (They should have gone at the top, but I'm not familiar with Google Spreadsheets and there was some hidden row I didn't want to mess up.)

However, using a familiar calendar layout make be easier to scan if you can afford the vertical space. In the try below, I use a different shade of color for each menu week. It would be better with thicker borders around each month, but Google Spreadsheet doesn't seem to support that. 

By omitting week-ends, you do lose the ability to highlight the current day. In the second example, I instead used red text for the current week.
For more layouts along these lines, you might search for "calendar plot" and "calendar graph".
