Excel Holiday Dinner Planner Template

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!

Select dinner start time from drop-down list
Select dinner start time from drop-down list

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.
Enter dinner items and times
Enter dinner items and times

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.

Print the Dinner Prep Schedule
Print the Dinner Prep Schedule

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!

Holiday Spending Trackers
Holiday Spending Trackers

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.

Holiday Dinner Planner

Excel Weekly Planner Template

Excel Gift Ideas

Excel Advent Calendars

Chicken Dinner Planner

Excel Christmas Tree – scroll bar

Excel Christmas Tree – icons

9 thoughts on “Excel Holiday Dinner Planner Template”

  1. 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?

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