If you’re busy getting ready for a big family dinner today, you might find the dinner planner in this Excel workbook helpful.
When Will We Eat?
At the top of the worksheet, you can enter your target dinner hour.
The entire timetable will be based on that entry, so choose wisely!
What’s On the Menu
After you pick a dinner time, you can enter information for the dinner planning schedule.
- First, enter a list of the food you need to prepare,
- After that, enter how long each step takes.
See the Step Start Times
When it has all the details, the Excel dinner planner calculates the start time for each item.
Then, sort the list by the Start Time column, to see all the preparation steps, in order that they need to be started.
Print Dinner Schedule
I use this dinner planner for our all of our family dinners, and it’s a big help in scheduling, and staying on track.
I like to print out the preparation schedule, and keep it on the kitchen counter while we get the dinner ready.
Dinner Prep Timeline Chart
There’s also a fancy Excel timeline chart, if you like to see visual overviews.
Who is going to peel the potatoes, and when should they start? That chore always takes way longer than you expect!
Plan Your Shopping
The Excel workbook also other helpful sheet, like this Holiday Spending tracker.
If you’re going to any of the Black Friday sales tomorrow, you can make a list of the items you want to buy, in column D
Then, when you get home from your successful shopping trip, enter the cost for each item in column E
And good luck out there — it can get wild in the malls at this time of year!
More Excel Holiday Templates
Here are a few more pages on my Contextures site, where you can find Excel files for help with holiday planning, or a bit of holiday fun and games.
I’m sorry, this is just a little too OCD.
Where’s the the long bar at the top for “Brandy – drink”?
Jon, “too OCD” — is that even possible?
Doug — good question. It’s assumed as an on-going task, but I should add it for the benefit of the first time holiday cooks.
Jon,
It won’t be OCD until you see the pivottables and pivotcharts and reports that Deb shares with the guests.
Dave, all the guests are required to sign an NDA, so those pivot reports will never be seen by the general public (whew!)
I prepared a timeline chart with all 325 steps required to prepare our dinner. It worked perfectly, and everything was great. Dinner was 21 seconds late, due to a serious underestimation of the turnip peeling time. But nobody complained too much.
Couldn’t have done it without this tool.
BTW, does anyone know how to remove gravy from a laptop keyboard?
Wow, good thing Excel 2007 has more rows, because Christmas might be even more complicated.
As for the keyboard, lick it?