It’s only a week until Thanksgiving, if you live in the USA, and maybe you’ve got everything organized, and ready to go. If not, I’ve got a couple of Excel holiday planner tools that can help you. There’s short video below, that shows a quick demo of the Excel holiday tools.
Holiday Meal Planner
The first tool is my Excel Holiday Dinner Planner. At the top of the sheet, select the time that you want to eat dinner.
I used this to organize our Canadian Thanksgiving dinner in October, and I’ll use it again at Christmas, even though it will be just the two of us.
- Pro Tip: For Thanksgiving this year, we cooked and carved the turkey the day before. That made Thanksgiving day much more relaxing, and we’ll definitely do that again at Christmas.
What’s For Dinner?
After you select your dinner time, the next step is to list:
- all the dishes you’ll be serving for your holiday dinner
- preparation steps for every item on the menu
- time estimate for each step
Sort the completed list, and Excel calculates when each preparation step should start.
Finally, go to the Print Plan Timetable sheet, and print out a copy of the schedule, to take to the kitchen.
Here’s our schedule from last Christmas, and we had to get the turkey into the oven at 1:05 PM.
Excel Holiday Planner
The next tool is my Excel Holiday Planner, which helps you organize all the events and shopping over the holiday season.
Thanksgiving is just the beginning! After that, there’s only a month until Christmas, and you might have lots of shopping and planning to prepare for that.
And it’s not just for Christmas planning. You can enter the date for any upcoming celebration, to make sure you’re staying organized.
Here’s a screen shot of the Calendar sheet, where you can enter up to 5 events per day. If you have more than that, you’re too busy!
Stay on Budget with Excel
Of course, Excel is great with numbers and calculations. You can keep track of your holiday budget in the Excel holiday planner too, and make sure that you don’t overspend.
Here’s a screen shot of the Summary page, where you can see how things are going.
- How much of the budget is left?
- How many presents do you still need to buy?
- How many days are left until the holiday arrives?
Excel Gift Idea
And if you’re looking for the perfect gift for someone who loves Excel, how about a highly-rated online Excel course?
You can get 20% off Mynda Treacy’s Excel courses, from today (November 17th) until Thursday, December 2nd.
Choose from her extensive list of courses (affiliate link), and don’t forget to find something that you’d like too! There’s always something new to learn in Excel, no matter how long you’ve been using it.
These two courses are popular, and would be a great investment in upgrading your Excel skills.
— 1) Excel Dashboards
— 2) Power BI
Free Excel Dashboard Tutorial
Mynda is also posting a new (free) Dashboard tutorial today, and the recording will be available after 7 AM (Toronto time).
Click this link to go to the free tutorial, and the screen shot below shows the finished dashboard that you’ll see Mynda build in the tutorial.
More Excel Holiday Fun
For more Excel files that have holiday planning help, and a bit of fun, go to the Excel for the Holidays page on my Contextures site.
This short video shows a quick demo of the holiday planner, Advent calendars, Christmas trees, and more.
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Excel for the Holidays 2022
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