A schedule is important for every aspect of your life. It not only helps you manage your time, it can also reduce stress, help you evaluate progress as you work, and prepare you for the unexpected.
From organizing your to-do list to planning an event, a schedule will keep you on track and make sure you never miss a thing.
Using a template is the easiest way to make a schedule. In this article, you’ll find the best daily, weekly, and monthly schedule templates in Excel. We’ll give you step-by-step instructions for finding the best schedule template for your needs and tell you how to customize these Excel templates.
Additionally, we’ve provided customizable schedule templates in Smartsheet, a work execution platform that empowers you to better manage tasks, timelines, and due dates with real-time collaboration and process automation.
Download Daily, Weekly, and Monthly Schedule Templates for Excel
You can find a variety of schedule templates in Excel, ranging from monthly schedules, weekday displays, and schedules with notes. There templates are pre-made and formatted, ready for you to add your own information.
With so many available schedule templates, how do you know which one is the easiest to use? We’ve sorted through them all and found the best daily, weekly, and monthly schedule templates for Excel.
Weekly Schedule Template in Excel
Download Free Work Week Schedule Excel Template (Mon-Fri)
Download Free Full Week Schedule Excel Template (Sun-Sat)
In a weekly Excel schedule template, each day is broken up into morning, afternoon, and evening, and you can adjust how much space you would like for each block of the day.
Common uses:
- College class schedule: Get a high-level view of all your classes for the week with a class schedule. You can quickly fill in their course information, like class name, location, and time, and better manage your time during the week.
- Housekeeping/chore schedule: Organize your housekeeping and chore list by printing out a weekly schedule template and filling in the task for each day, like vacuuming, sweeping, dusting, etc., and assigning each task. It’s an easy way to see all the housekeeping planned for the week and who is doing what.
- Employee shift schedule: Make sure the right people are working at the right times with an employee shift schedule. Assign shifts to each person and indicate their position (manager, cashier, front desk, support, etc). You could even add a column with total weekly hours to track employee workload.
- Travel itinerary: Never miss a flight, train, or bus again. Track departure cities, arrival cities, flight numbers, airport locations, hotel reservations and more with a weekly travel itinerary. All your important information will be in one place, keeping you on time and informed.
- Project schedule: Coordinate tasks, deliverables, due dates, owners, and more with a project schedule. Ensure your project meets deadlines and manage resource allocation over your workweek.
Daily Schedule Template in Excel
Free Daily Template: Excel | Smartsheet
A daily schedule template usually spans Sunday-Saturday and includes duration in hours, with 30 minute increments. This kind of schedule will give you the most granular level of detail, letting you track even the smallest tasks during the day.
Common uses:
- Personal appointment/meeting planner: Manage all your personal appointments and meetings on a daily, hour-by-hour basis. Print out the daily schedule and put it in your purse, bag, or wallet so it’s always accessible. Or, even better, access it on your phone so you can easily add, delete, or edit items.
- To-do list planner: Instead of writing all your to-do items in a never-ending list, break them out and distribute them during the week so you know exactly what you have to achieve each day. Organize your to-dos by time of day and cross them out when you’ve completed each one.
- Baby feeding schedule: Record the exact times you nurse throughout the day to make sure you’re sticking with the appropriate feeding schedule. You can also track how long you nurse for and the number of total feeds per day.
Monthly Schedule Template in Excel
Download Free Monthly Excel Template
A monthly schedule template provides a high-level view of the entire month. Each of the 12 months in 2016 are typically a different tab in the Excel file.
Common uses:
- Seasonal maintenance: Remind yourself to change your HVAC filters, clean the gutters, winterize the air conditioning system and more with a monthly seasonal maintenance schedule. Add all the items you need to track at the beginning of the calendar year and display the schedule in your garage or on the fridge.
- Monthly menu planner: Plan out your meals for the entire month with a menu planner. Include breakfast, lunch, dinner and snack ideas for each calendar day and print out the planner when you go grocery shopping for a ready-made list.
- Event planning schedule: Use a monthly event planning schedule to coordinate the hundreds of activities and tasks that need to happen before the big day. Add due dates and owners to ensure you meet deadlines.
Weekly Schedule Templates in Smartsheet
These weekly schedule templates span the entire week, from Monday-Sunday. Many of the templates use hierarchy to organize information, with collapsible rows so you can hide or display certain dates or tasks.
All these templates highlight Smartsheet’s collaboration features. For example, in the weekly class schedule, you can color-code your courses so you can quickly visualize your schedule for the week. In the meal planner template, you can easily attach links to your favorite recipes for easy access. And, in the house cleaning schedule, you can assign chores to certain people to hold your family accountable.
Shift Schedule: Excel | Smartsheet
Daily Schedule Templates in Smartsheet
Daily Work Schedule
Daily To-Do List
Daily Meetings & Appointments Schedule
Smartsheet’s daily schedules are organized by 30-minute increments, from 7am-9pm. If you want the schedule to span more or less time, just right-click on a cell and select Delete Row or Insert Row. Use the star symbols in the daily to-do list to designate priority and set reminders for your daily meetings and appointments, and daily work so you never miss a beat.
Monthly Schedule Templates in Smartsheet
Event Planning Schedule
These monthly schedules include every month of the year for 2017, and you can adjust how much space you want to designate for each month by adding or delete rows. If you want to change any of the dates in the schedule (like if you need to change the year), simply enter the first couples date by hand, then select these cells and drag the bottom right-hand corner all the way down to autofill the rest.
Have comments directly in the project schedule template to unclog your inbox, automatically create dynamic Gantt charts, and use symbols to quickly convey status, priority, and progress.
Gantt Chart Project Schedule: Excel | Smartsheet
Sports Roster & Schedule
Project Schedule Template
Which Schedule Template to Use?
Once you decide on a daily, weekly, or monthly template, you then need to choose a layout, duration type (do you want Monday-Friday or Sunday-Saturday?), the sharing capabilities, and printing options. With all these factors to consider, it can be difficult to know which schedule template to use.
Here are some things to consider as you’re searching for a schedule template:
1. What is your timeframe or duration?
You first need to figure out if you need a daily, weekly, or monthly template. The daily schedule is the only template that has duration in hours (with 30 minute increments), the weekly schedule’s duration is broken up into morning, afternoon, and evening, and the monthly template has the least amount of granularity, with duration in days.
The events, tasks, or projects that you need to track on the schedule will dictate what kind of template you need. If you need to organize to-dos or appointments, the daily schedule will work the best. If you need to track longer term tasks or repeating events, consider a template that spans more time.
2. How many people will be using it?
Think about who you need to share your schedule with. Is this a personal document that you will to track your own tasks and to-dos? Is this a family housekeeping/chore schedule that you need to print out and tape on the fridge or email to your spouse and children? Or, will you be using this schedule at work, collaborating and editing it with colleagues and external collaborators?
As a general tip, if you need to share your schedule with more than one person, you should look for an online version of the template so you can share, collaborate, and edit it in real time. If it will be a personal schedule, then make sure you have robust customization and printing capabilities to make sure it fits all your needs.
3. How many events or projects need to be tracked?
While you can choose the level of granularity in duration of your schedule, you also need to identify the level of detail you need to add to your template and the number of items you want to include.
To get a sense of the complexity of your events or projects, jot down one or two items you anticipate adding to your schedule. Write down all the details you need to include (item name, item details, assigned to, due date, location, contact information, etc). This exercise will give you a sense of the amount of space you need on your schedule. If you are sticking with a high-level view of the details, you could use the monthly schedule. If you are tracking multiple tasks per day, you may want to look at the daily schedule template.
How to Customize Your Excel Template
It’s easy to customize your daily, weekly, or monthly schedule template in Excel. You can color-code certain items, like appointments or birthdays, or change font size and type. You can even add a logo to the calendar if you’re using it for work or with clients.
1. Format Fonts
- To change the font size of the headers, first highlight all the headers. In the Home tab, you can format the font type and size.
- To format the date or time markers, highlight the entire column or all the date boxes. In the Home tab, you can adjust the font type and size.
2. Change Colors
You can change the font colors or the background colors in your schedule. Color-coding may be especially helpful for labeling certain types of events or tasks.
- To change the background color of a header, highlight the whole row, click the paint bucket icon, and select the fill color.
- To color code an event, type a task or appointment into a date box. Then, select the text, click the paint bucket icon, and select the appropriate fill color.
3. Add a Photo
Customize your schedule by adding images, like your company logo.
- In the Insert tab, click Pictures. Upload the picture you would like to use.
- The image will be added to your spreadsheet and you can drag it anywhere in the sheet.
If you would like to add your logo or picture to the top of the schedule, you may need to add extra space so the image can fit.
- Right-click the first row of the whole spreadsheet and select Insert.
- Click Entire Row.
- Repeat depending on how many extra rows you’d like.
- To make the background of the new rows white, highlight the new rows, click the paint bucket icon, and select white.
- To remove the grid line above the title row, select the title row, click the grid icon, and click the options with the removed gridlines.
Now you have extra white space to drag your image to the top.
Printable vs Online Schedule Templates
In addition to finding the best schedule template for your needs, you’ll also have to think about printing and online collaboration capabilities.
Many people print out their schedules and put them on a fridge or wall. Or, for schedules like the to-do list planner or personal appointment/meeting planner, some put them in their purse or wallet for easy access.
While it can be helpful to print out and display the schedule for everyone to see, a paper calendar can actually make your life more chaotic and disorganized. If you forget or misplace the schedule, you have to start over from scratch. If someone wants to edit or add something, you won’t know who did it, unless you can recognize their handwriting. And, with limited space, your calendar can quickly get cluttered and messy with multiple edits and additions.
To have guaranteed, 24/7 access to your schedule, look for a cloud-based, collaborative solution. You want to be able to view and edit your schedule wherever you are, on a smartphone or on a desktop.
And, you’ll save a ton of paper by moving your schedule online. If you are sharing your calendar with multiple people, an online tool will streamline communication and changes. You can track edits and control permission levels, choosing whether someone is a viewer, editor, or admin.
And, many online tools have collaboration features to bring your schedule to the next level. You can have comments directly in the tool, set reminders or notifications, switch between a normal view, a Gantt view, or a calendar view, or add attachments.
Create Easier, Collaborative Schedules with Smartsheet
Smartsheet is a spreadsheet-inspired work management tool with robust collaboration and communication features. With dozens of pre-built templates and sharing capabilities, Smartsheet is perfect for simple to-do list planners or more complex project schedules. And it’s easy to customize the templates — simply right-click on any column to rename the column headers and double-click on any cell to add your own information. You can also change the colors, fonts, and switch between grid view, Gantt view, or calendar view.
Improve Scheduling Efforts with Real-Time Task Management in Smartsheet
Tracking schedules, documenting deadlines, and staying up-to-date on daily, weekly, and monthly schedules is the key to making sure day-to-day operations run smoothly. Having the right tool to keep everyone in sync ensures that all projects and processes stay on track and all critical deadlines are met.
One such tool is Smartsheet, an enterprise work execution platform that is fundamentally changing the way businesses and teams work. Over 74,000 brands and millions of information workers trust Smartsheet as the best way to plan, track, automate, and report on schedules and timelines.
The familiar Smartsheet interface that is designed for how people actually work leads to rapid and broad adoption across your organization. Use Smartsheet to gain real-time visibility into task lists and schedules, and then access and manage them from anywhere, at any time. Share schedules with an unlimited number of internal and external team members, to improve collaboration and ensure that deadlines are met.
Try Smartsheet to discover how you can maximize your scheduling efforts, today.
Follow a schedule to stay on top of your life
Design custom schedule templates to help you plan out your year and manage projects for your business. Use Excel to set schedules by the month, day, and even down to the hour. Leave fields for you to add in details of what task you want to complete during the time. Save your schedule template so that you can schedule it with your business partners and employees. Use it in a collaborative effort so that they can add to your schedule when you have availability. Rearrange your schedule during busy seasons, like for annual sales or holiday sales. Create a schedule for your different social media profiles so that your business knows when to post and what to post. Add your brand’s logo to the top of the schedule so that all your internal documentation stays consistent. Follow the schedule so that you’re using your time wisely and effectively.
We have a number of schedule templates and calendars that you can download and edit using Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice. A spreadsheet is a great tool for creating a daily schedule or weekly schedule. It’s not too difficult to create your own schedule from scratch, but like most people, you probably value your time and money, so hopefully our free schedule templates will be just what you need.
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Schedule Templates
Class Schedule
This class schedule is essential for any college student. Use it to help you plan your weekly class schedule for a new semester to ensure that you don’t accidentally overlap your work, classes, training times, etc.
Work Schedule
This work schedule template is designed to let you print two weeks at a time. Easily modify the template for night shifts or other shifts. Includes mini monthly calendars for convenience in planning.
Lesson Schedule
Create a yearly lesson schedule for a class with multiple teachers.
Weekly Reward Chart
Download a weekly reward chart for tracking progress on chores, practice, or other tasks.
Weekly Schedule
This weekly schedule is a generic version of the class schedule template listed above, but not as complicated as the weekly calendar.
Shift Schedules
Shift Schedule
This shift schedule template is great for job scheduling, shift scheduling, etc.
Shift Calendar
Create a yearly shift calendar for rotating 24-hour shifts. Designed specifically for firefighters.
Employee Schedule
Create a shift schedule for any number of employees. Simple design for easy customization. Set up for a day and night shift.
Meal Planner
These meal planners are great for creating and printing weekly or monthly meal plans. Customize your own list of meals to populate the drop down lists in the planners.
Daily Planner
A printable daily schedule template that lets you create your own daily planner using standard letter-size paper that can be included in your 3-ring binder.
Weekly Planner
A printable weekly planner page for people who don’t need the detail of the daily planner.
Monthly Planner
A printable monthly planner page with notes, to-do list, and goals section (not just a calendar).
Yearly Planner Calendar
This planning calendar can be used to print a 2-page, 12-month calendar with space below each day to write brief notes.
Family Planner
A printable weekly family planner template for appointments and meals with lists for to dos, chores, and shopping.
Homework Planner
Get organized. List your assignments and plan your week to get your homework done.
Weekly Student Planner
Keep up with your assignments and other activities using this 2-page student planner with columns for each subject and rows for each week day.
Appointment Book
Print a full year of weekly appointment calendar pages (double-sided) that you can assemble into a book or 3-ring binder.
Bullet Journal Pages
Use this template to update calendars and dates then print bullet journal pages in a variety of formats.
Follow a schedule to stay on top of your life
Design custom schedule templates to help you plan out your year and manage projects for your business. Use Excel to set schedules by the month, day, and even down to the hour. Leave fields for you to add in details of what task you want to complete during the time. Save your schedule template so that you can schedule it with your business partners and employees. Use it in a collaborative effort so that they can add to your schedule when you have availability. Rearrange your schedule during busy seasons, like for annual sales or holiday sales. Create a schedule for your different social media profiles so that your business knows when to post and what to post. Add your brand’s logo to the top of the schedule so that all your internal documentation stays consistent. Follow the schedule so that you’re using your time wisely and effectively.
Project scheduling can be hard, but software can make it more manageable. If you’re not quite ready to make the leap to an online project scheduling software, though, then project scheduling templates for Excel can be a decent substitute to get started.
ProjectManager has dozens of free project management templates that you can download to assist in managing every phase of your project. Here are a few project scheduling templates to help you get started right away.
But if you’re looking for project scheduling software that can take you to the next level of scheduling, then you want ProjectManager. Our cloud-based software can plan, monitor and report on your project schedule from start to finish. Make sure you’re meeting those milestones with our real-time dashboard, which unlike templates or other software requires no setup. Get started today for free.
Best Project Scheduling Templates for Excel
Microsoft Excel isn’t naturally a good project scheduling tool. However, these free project scheduling templates can help you build a schedule and stick to it. Without them, you’ll have a hard time getting your project off the ground; with them, you’re on your way to a successful project. Transform your spreadsheets with these Excel scheduling templates.
1. Gantt Chart Template
Project schedules are made up of tasks—a lot of tasks. The crucial step in scheduling any project is organizing those tasks. You need to estimate their duration and set a priority for each so your team knows what to do, and when to do it. A task list can start this process, but you’ll quickly find yourself hitting a wall unless you use a Gantt chart.
Gantt charts are visual tools that take every project task and place them on a timeline. You can see each task in relation to the others, since they’re represented as bars. Our Gantt chart template helps you set start and end dates, shows dependencies between tasks and breaks up the phases of your project by color to easily differentiate one from another. It’s an ideal project schedule template.
You can discuss building the Gantt with your team, who’ll help you better estimate durations. Then, once you’ve created the schedule on your Gantt, share the chart with your stakeholders. It will provide a map of the project and help to orient them when you regularly update them throughout execution.
2. Work Breakdown Structure Template
Before you can schedule, you have to know what you’re scheduling. A work breakdown structure is a tool that captures all your deliverables. It’s a tree diagram with the final deliverable on top and then a breakdown of each deliverable or task that got you there. It’s an essential scheduling tool.
Our free work breakdown structure template has everything you’ll need to see all the steps necessary to schedule in order to complete your project. First, you make a detailed task list broken up into the phases of your project. The second part of the template is the tree diagram, with the project on top and smaller and smaller deliverables beneath it. Now you know everything you have to add to your project schedule.
3. Work Schedule Template
Your project schedule is just a collection of dates if you don’t coordinate it with your resources. Resources are anything you need to get the job done—this includes equipment, materials and, most importantly, your team. Organizing these resources to work with your schedule, and bring the project to a successful conclusion on time, is where a work schedule comes in handy.
Our work schedule template allows you to collect all the people in your team or organization, and designate where they’re located (if they’re working remotely), including their working hours and what work they’re responsible for. All of this is laid out over a period of time, usually over a week or month.
The flexibility of this project schedule template stems from its ability to adapt to various work schedules. There is the traditional 9am to 5pm, Monday through Friday. But some projects or organizations are working all week, around the clock. These shifts can be fixed or set as rotating. Whether your workers are part-time or full-time, this work schedule template will help you keep them organized.
If you use ProjectManager you’ll be able to do a lot more in terms of scheduling. Templates can only go so far. See what a schedule looks like on cloud-based project management software. Watch the video embedded below.
4. Task Tracking Template
Once you have a project schedule and your resources are organized, the real fun begins. When executing your tasks, it’s important to have the means to monitor progress and make sure the actual progress meets the planned progress. Our task tracking template lets you capture your work and helps you keep on schedule.
This project schedule template serves as more than a to-do list, but less than what task management software can do. However, the template will let you keep track of your task’s status, priority, time and resources. It follows the tasks through its life cycle from ready to assigned, terminated or expired, forwarded to finished or failed.
If you’re looking for a more dynamic tool to track your tasks and keep you on schedule, then you’ll want to upgrade to an online project management software. You’ll get high-level views of progress with a dashboard and more in-depth data from the various reporting features. You’ll also want features to manage your resources and easily edit your schedule as changes occur.
5. Change Log Template
The unexpected happens to even the best-planned projects. Your project schedule is a living document that needs to be able to respond to change requests from stakeholders. Or, other variables such as weather, sick team members or problems in your supply chain can interrupt your progress. You need to have a change log that keeps track of these changes.
Using our change log template helps you identify and follow the change as it moves through your project. This makes sure nothing falls through the cracks, and gives you the tools you need to control and manage that change. The change log provides visibility into the process. You assign someone on your team to resolve it, which lets you establish accountability.
You also get to prioritize the change, as not every change is equal in importance. Then, you can track the change from start to finish. The template has a place for you to number the change, when it was first identified, who owns it and its current status. Each row of the spreadsheet captures one change, so you have an orderly document to manage the process.
6. Project Plan Template
A project schedule is part of the larger project plan. It must work in congress with all the other aspects of your project, such as resource allocation, costs and more. The project plan includes a lot of guiding documents that will inform you schedule, too, from the business case to the project charter.
The free project plan template for word helps you to organize all the important papers necessary to plan and schedule a project. You can attach all the pertinent files, such as your feasibility study, and then outline the scope of the project. Once you completed your project plan, you can finalize your project schedule.
7. Project Status Report Template
The project status is a report that captures where the project is at a specific time. You can see it’s health and progress. This can be used to update stakeholders but is also a valuable asset for project managers. They can use the status plan to see if they’re on schedule.
Using the free project status report template for Excel captures all the metrics you need to keep your project on track. There’s general information, a summary of the project status, the project health, a risk management overview and recommendations and concerns. This free template is vital to deliver your project on time.
8. Resource Plan Template
Resources are a major part of any project schedule. They are the people and things that you’ll need to complete the tasks in your project. Allocating them works hand-in-glove with your project schedule. You need to know what and when you require the resource.
Using our free resource plan template for Excel helps you organize all your resources for the project. You can list all the team members on one side and then define them by which department they’re working in. Next you can add their rate, cost and availability. It’s the free proejct scheduling template you need to track the availability of your resources.
9. Project Dashboard Template
To make sure your schedule is on track once your team starts to execute it, you need to monitor its progress and performance. The status report is one such tool. Another is a project dashboard, which measures several project metrics and displays them in graphs and charts.
The free project dashboard template for Excel is a powerful tool that allows you to track the status of your tasks, the workload of your team, task lengths and costs. However, all that data has to be manually put into the template and updated, whereas software does that work for you.
10. Estimate Template
Another part of creating a project schedule is estimating. The more accurately you can forecast your project costs, the more accurate your project schedule will be. Estimating requires gathering data and then calculating that data to come up with what your project budget will be, which informs your project schedule.
To make better forecasts on project costs that will impact your project schedule, we have a free estimate template. The this scheduling template is broken up into project phases. Under each of these is a list of tasks that has space to add the vendor or contractor, the labor and material costs and then a total. When you add up all the costs of your tasks you’ll have a clear idea of what the project will require financially.
11. Risk Register Template
Nothing can take you off schedule faster than when issues arise in your project. When planning a schedule you need to be aware of what risks might show up, so you can quickly identify them and resolve them before they negatively impact the project. For that, you need a risk register.
A free risk register template allows you to collect all the potential issues that might impact your project. You can describe the risk in the far left column, then in the next column write how it would impact the project. Following that there is a column to note your response, the level of the risk and who is responsible for identifying and resolving it.
12. Project Budget Template
The budget is one of the most impactful elements of the project plan on your scheduling. You can’t keep working if you’re not funded. Therefore, a project manager must know what the costs of the project are before they can schedule the work to be completed by the deadline.
With the project budget template for Excel you have space to list all the labor and material costs, which tasks they are being used for and who is assigned to do that work. There are other line items, too, such as travel expenses, equipment rentals and fixed items, where the amount is set and doesn’t change. Capture the cost of your project with our free template.
ProjectManager Helps with Project Scheduling
You can schedule a project using these free templates, however, you’ll find yourself overburdened and always behind. What you need is project management software that has real-time data to plan the project but also monitor it as it’s being executed to help you stay on track. ProjectManager is cloud-based that helps you plan your project schedule, monitor its progress and keep track of your team’s performance so you can meet your deadlines.
Plan Your Schedule on Interactive Gantt Charts
Getting all your project tasks, resources and costs to come in on time is complicated. Gantt charts are a great tool to organize all those activities and see them on a timeline that shows you the entire project in one place. You can link dependencies to avoid delays and even filter for the critical path. Then set a baseline and you’ll be able to track project variance to make sure you’re staying on schedule.
Use Multiple Project Views
Managers love Gantt charts but teams don’t need to view the project schedule with that level of detail. They want to know which tasks are assigned to them and when they’re due. All the data scheduled on the Gantt simultaneously shows up on our other project views, such as the sheet, task list, kanban and calendar views. There’s one source of truth keeping everyone working on the same page but teams can track their tasks on calendars for important upcoming dates, robust task lists or the visual workflow of a kanban.
Track Your Team’s Progress on Tasks
As mentioned above, you can get a high-level view of the project with our real-time dashboard. To see how each team member is progressing on their assigned tasks, though, you can view the timesheets or generate a timesheet report. See how far your team has progressed in completing their tasks and know if you’re meeting the schedule or if you need to re-allocate resources to get back on track. Timesheets are secure and also streamline the payroll process.
Timesheets are just one of the many reports you can create with a keystroke. Get reports on time, cost and more to help you keep to your schedule. All reports can be filtered to show only the data you want to see and then easily shared with stakeholders to keep them updated. Our software not only helps you stay on schedule but has task and resource management, workflow automation and much more. It’s the only software you’ll need to manage your projects.
ProjectManager is award-winning software that plans, schedules and controls every aspect of your project. Our collaborative platform connects hybrid teams and helps them work better together regardless of where, when or how they work. Join the successful teams at NASA, Siemens and Nestles who use our tool to deliver projects on time. Get started today for free.