Good afternoon Mike and welcome to the Events Calendar forum!
Thank you for your interest in our products.
We’ll be glad to answer your questions.
Is there a way to display the calendar in a better format with previous month, next month, etc or do I have to purchase the Pro version to get a nice layout ?
How the calendar looks really depends on 3 things:
- Your settings under Events -> Settings -> Display. Please experiment with these.
- The WordPress theme you are using
- Any customization you make to the different calendar views. You might want to read our Themer’s guide to get a sense of how that works.
The Pro version will provide you with many awesome features like advanced widgets and shortcodes to display your calendar in many ways, shapes or forms.
These might help you get the layout you are looking for.
You also get 2 new views: the photo view and the map view.
You can read a bit about them and see them here: https://theeventscalendar.com/product/wordpress-events-calendar-pro/
Let me know if that helps.
Have a great day!
Geoff B.