Excel Templates - Contextures Blog

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

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.

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

Get Organized With Excel Holiday Planner

There are sites that offer Christmas Planner templates, usually in pdf format, which you can download and print.

Then, store the printed sheets in a binder, and write out your task list, holiday budget, gift list and calendar.

It’s Better in Excel

I’m sure that helps people who are trying to organize a hectic holiday season, but Excel would be a better tool for all those lists and budgets.

So, with my daughter’s help, I created an Excel Christmas Planner that you can download from my web site.

Instead of hand writing your lists, and doing your budgeting on a calculator, enter all the details in an Excel workbook, and let it do the heavy lifting for you.

ChristmasCover

Planning Sheets

There are 15 sheets in the planner, currently, and we’ll add more, if we have new ideas.

For example, there’s an extended weekly calendar, so you can see what’s happening on specific days.

You can also make a list of upcoming tasks, keep a master gift list, keep costs in line with a holiday budget planner, and many more sheets.

Dinner Planner

The workbook includes a dinner planner, which will help you schedule the preparation for any large meal.

The dinner planner is helpful for smaller meals too, if they have lots of preparation steps!

You can get organized for the American Thanksgiving this week, or Christmas next month, or a weekend dinner party, any time of the year.

What Should We Add?

It’s our first draft of our Holiday Planner, so there’s probably much more that we could add. If you have any suggestions for improving it, we’d love to hear from you!

Using Excel as a 3D Game Engine

In an article on the Gamasutra blog, Peter Rakos describes how Excel can be used as a 3D game engine.

That’s not something that I’ve tried in my workbooks, but he makes a convincing argument:

“I hope you will discover that Excel effectively and efficiently incorporates practicality, tons of features, the multi-platform portability and the high performance with the unique and futuristic 3D engine features.”

Making Games in Excel

Have you built any games in Excel, for your own entertainment, or to share with other people?

To see a few games that I’ve built, and links to other people’s creations, go to the Excel Games page on my Contextures site.

You’ll find several games to download, including a Concentration card game that Doug Glancy made. The goal is to turn over matching pairs of cards.

You can even choose the pattern you’d like for the back of the cards.

Print Bingo Cards in Excel

There are printable Excel games too, like my Bingo Card template.

This workbook has three printable Bingo cards on the main worksheet. Each bingo card has a set of 24 random numbers, with a FREE square in the centre of the card.

The random numbers are filled in by formulas, so you can print a large number or unique Bingo cards. There are no macros needed in this workbook.

To get these games and more, go to the Excel Games page on my Contextures site.

bingo card numbers 1 to 75