To do list microsoft excel

The human mind is a powerful thing. 

But sometimes, it can suddenly blank out! 

Like forgetting to note down the grocery items missing in your pantry or the project changes your client wants by the end of the day. 

While our brain can do quite a lot, sometimes relying on our memory isn’t always the best way to keep track of our tasks. 

That’s why a to-do list in Excel can be helpful. 

It helps you break down your tasks into different sections on a single spreadsheet, which you can view at any time. 

In this article, we’ll cover the six steps to create a to-do list in Excel and also discuss a better alternative that can handle more complex requirements the easier way. 

Let’s roll!

ClickUp Customizable Checklists CTA

What Is a To Do List in Excel?

A to-do list in Microsoft Excel helps you organize your most essential tasks in a tabular form. It comes with rows and columns to add a new task, dates, and other specific notes.

Basically, it lets you assemble all your to-dos on a single spreadsheet. 

Whether you’re preparing a move-in checklist or a project task list, a to-do list in Excel can simplify your work process and store all your information. 

While there are other powerful apps for creating to-do lists, people use Excel because: 

  • It’s a part of the Microsoft Office Suite people are familiar with
  • It offers powerful conditional formatting rules and data validation for analysis and calculations
  • It includes an array of reporting tools like matrices, charts, and pivot tables, making it easier to customize the data

In fact, you can create Excel to-do lists for a wide range of activities, including project management, client onboarding, travel itinerary, inventory, and event management. 

Without further ado, let’s learn how to create a to-do list in Excel. 

6 Simple Steps To Make a To Do List in Excel

Here’s a simple step-by-step guide on how to make a to-do list in Excel.

Step 1: Open a new Excel file

To open a new file, click on the Excel app, and you’ll find yourself at the Excel Home page. Double-click on the Blank Workbook to open a new Excel spreadsheet.

Blank workbook template in Excel

If you’re already on an Excel sheet and want to open a new file:

  • Click on the File tab, which will take you to the backstage view. Here you can create, save, open, print, and share documents
  • Select New, then click on Blank Workbook
Open a blank workbook in Excel

Want an even faster route?

Press Ctrl+N after opening Excel to create a Blank Workbook. 

Your new workbook is now ready for you. 

Step 2: Add column headers

In our Excel to-do list, we want to track tasks and keep an eye on the progress by adding the column headers: Date, Task Name, Target, Status, and Comments. You can enter the column headers across the top row of the spreadsheet. 

Add column headers in Excel workbook

These column headers will let anyone viewing your spreadsheet get the gist of all the information under it.  

Step 3: Enter the task details

Enter your task details under each column header to organize your information the way you want. 

In our to-do list table, we have collated all the relevant information we want to track:

  • Date: mentions the specific dates
  • Task Name: contains the name of our tasks
  • Target: the number of task items we aim to complete
  • Status: reflects our work progress 
How to fill out your Excel workbook

You can also fix the alignment of your table by selecting the cells you want and click on the icon for center alignment from the Home tab

Align text in Excel workbook

Step 4: Apply filters

Too many to-dos?

Use the Filter option in Excel to retrieve data that matches particular criteria. 

All you need to do is select any cell within the range of your data (A1-E11) > Select Data > then select Filter.

You’ll see drop-down lists appearing in the header of each column, as shown in the image below.

Dropdown options for workbook columns in Excel

Click on the drop-down arrow for the column you want to apply a filter.

Filtering columns in Excel

As shown in our to-do list table below, we want to apply the filter to the Status column, so we’ve selected the cell range of D1-D11.

Filtered and sorted columns in Excel

Then, in the Filter menu that appears, you can uncheck the boxes next to the data you don’t want to view and click OK. You can also quickly uncheck all by clicking on Select All.

Filter for what you want to see in Excel

In our to-do list, we want to view only the Open tasks, so we apply the filter for that data.

Filter for open tasks in Excel

After you save this Excel file, the filter will be there automatically the next time you open the file.

Step 5: Sort the data

You can use the Sort option in Excel to quickly visualize and understand your data better.

We want to sort the data in the Target column, so we’ll select the cell range C1-C11. Click on the Data tab and select Sort.

A Sort Warning dialog box will appear asking if you want to Expand the selection or Continue with the current selection. You can choose the latter option and click on Sort. 

Sorting warning in Excel

The Sort dialog box will open where you have to enter the:

  • The column you want to Sort by
  • Cell values you wish to Sort on
  • Order in which you want to sort the data

For our table, we have chosen the Target column and kept the order from smallest to largest. 

Sort columns by target value in Excel

Step 6: Edit and customize your to do list

You can edit fields, add columns, use colors and fonts to customize your to-do list the way you want.

Like in our table, we’ve highlighted the Status column so anybody viewing can quickly understand your task progress. 

Highlight columns to make them pop in Excel

And voila! ✨

We’ve created a simple Excel to-do list that can help you keep track of all your tasks.

Want to save more time? 

Create a template from your existing workbook to keep the same formatting options that you generally use while making your to-do lists.

Or you can use any to-do list Excel template to get started instantly. 

10 Excel To Do List Templates

Templates can help keep your workbooks consistent, especially when they’re related to a particular project or client. For example, a daily Excel to-do list template improves efficiency and enables you to complete your tasks sooner. 

Here are a few Excel to-do list templates that can help improve efficiency and save time:

1. Excel project management task list template

Project management task list template in Excel

Download this project management task list template.

2. Excel inventory list template

Inventory list template in Excel

Download these inventory list templates.

3. Excel action item list template

Action items list template in Excel

Download this action item list template. 

4. Excel simple to-do list template

Excel simple to-do lists template

Download this simple to-do list template.

5. Excel bill paying checklist template

Excel bill paying to-do list template

Download this bill paying checklist template.

6. Excel weekly assignment to-do list template

Excel weekly assignment to-do list template

Download this weekly assignment template.

7. Excel prioritized to-do list template

Excel prioritized to do list template

Download this prioritized to-do list template.

8. Excel homework to-do list template

Excel homework to-do list template

Download this homework to-do list template.

9. Excel to-do list with deadlines template

Excel to-do list with deadlines template

Download this to-do list with deadlines template.

10. Excel project task list template

Excel project task list template

Download this project task list template.

However, you can’t always find a template that will fulfill your specific needs. 

Additionally, data management in Excel is prone to human error. 

Each time a user copy-pastes information from one spreadsheet to another, there is a greater risk of new errors cropping up into successive reports. 

Before you commit to Excel to-do lists, here are some limitations to consider. 

3 Major Disadvantages of To Do Lists in Excel

Even though widely used, Excel spreadsheets aren’t always the best option for creating your to-do lists. 

Here are the three common disadvantages of using Excel for to-do lists:

1. Lack of ownership

When multiple individuals work on the same spreadsheet, you’re unable to tell who’s editing. 

You might end up repeating a task in vain if a person forgets to update the Work Status column in shared to-do lists after it’s done.

Additionally, people can easily alter task details, values, and other entries in the to-do lists (intentionally or unintentionally). You won’t know whom to hold accountable for the error or change! 

2. Inflexible templates

Not all of the Excel to-do templates you find online are reliable. Some of them are extremely difficult to manipulate or customize.

You’ll spend forever on the internet to find one that works for you.

3. Manual labor

Making to-do lists in Excel involves a significant amount of manual labor. 

It may take you quite some time to fill out your to-do items and create an organized system.

This doesn’t sit well with us because tons of project management tools can save you so much time and effort by creating and managing your to dos.

Moreover, the complexity increases with the increasing size of data in your Excel file. Naturally, you’d want a substitute to streamline your to-dos to track them and reduce the monotonous, manual work involved. 

And honestly, Excel is no to-do list app.

To manage to-dos, you need a tool that’s specifically designed for it.

Like ClickUp, one of the highest-rated productivity and project management software that lets you create and manage to-dos with ease.

Related Excel guides:

  • How to create a Kanban board in Excel
  • How to create a burndown chart in Excel
  • How to create a flowchart in Excel
  • How to make an org chart in Excel
  • How to create a dashboard in Excel

Create To Do Lists Effortlessly With ClickUp

ClickUp can help you create smart to-do lists to organize your tasks. 

From adding Due Dates to setting Priorities, ClickUp’s comprehensive features let you create and conquer all your to-dos!

How?

One word: Checklists

ClickUp’s Checklists give you the perfect opportunity to organize your task information so you never miss even the smallest of details. 

All you need to do is click on Add beside To Do (you can find it within any ClickUp task), then select Checklist. You can name your Checklist and start adding the action items. Easy!

Checklists in ClickUp

Easily organize task information so you never miss a beat with Checklists in ClickUp

Checklists within ClickUp give your tasks a clear outline. Apart from noting down the essential details, you also get subtasks to break down your tasks further. 

You can also arrange and rearrange the checklist items with the easy drag-and-drop feature. 

Reorganize ClickUp Checklists

Reorganize your ClickUp Checklist by dragging and dropping your items

Worried about some tasks getting overlooked?

With ClickUp, you can add Assignees to your specific to-dos to see things through. 

Assign items in ClickUp Checklists

Manage items on your Checklist by assigning them to yourself or the team in ClickUp

It also lets you reuse your favorite Checklist Templates to scale your work efficiency. 

To choose a template:

  • Click Add from the To Do section of any task
  • Click Checklist to reveal your options
  • Choose a template and select Use Template
Checklist Templates in ClickUp

Use ClickUp’s Checklist Templates to stay efficient with different recurring tasks

Still hung up on Excel? That’s okay.

ClickUp’s Table view can help you move on.

But our Table view isn’t a mere matrix of rows and columns. 

You can visualize your data clearly and create Custom Fields to record almost anything from task progress to file attachments and 15+ other field types.

Moreover, you can easily import your ongoing project details into ClickUp with our Excel and CSV import options!

But wait, that’s not all!

Here are some other ClickUp features that’ll make you forget Excel in an instant:

  • Assign Task: assign tasks to one or Multiple Assignees to quicken your pace of work
  • Custom Tags: effectively organize your task details by adding Tags
  • Task Dependencies: help your teammates understand their to-dos concerning other tasks by setting Dependencies
  • Recurring Tasks: save your time and effort by streamlining repetitive to-dos
  • Google Calendar Sync: easily sync your Google Calendar events with the ClickUp Calendar view. Any updates in your Google Calendar will automatically reflect on ClickUp too
  • Smart Search: search Docs easily and other items that you’ve recently created, updated, or closed
  • Custom Statuses: denote the status of your tasks, so the team knows at which stage of the workflow they currently are
  • Notepad: jot down ideas quickly with our portable, digital Notepad
  • Embed view: declutter your screen and add the apps or websites alongside your tasks instead
  • Gantt Charts: track work progress, assignees, and dependencies with a simple drag and drop functionality (check out this Excel dependencies guide)

Tame Your To Do Lists With ClickUp

Excel may be a decent option for planning daily to-dos and simple task lists. However, when you work with multiple teammates and tasks, Excel might not be ideal for what you need. Collaboration isn’t easy, there’s too much manual labor, and no team accountability.

That’s why you need a robust to-do list tool to help you manage tasks, track deadlines, follow work progress, and foster team collaboration. 

Fortunately, ClickUp brings all of this to the table and so much more. 

You can create to-dos, set Reminders, track Goals, and view insightful Reports.

Switch to ClickUp for free and quit wasting all that brainpower on simple to-do lists! 

Love it or hate it, Excel is still an impressive piece of code. For over 30 years, spreadsheets have been the go-to tool for all kinds of projects, from not-so-exciting accounting & budgeting to AutoShape art or… flight simulators. But in today’s article, you’ll learn something different. Here’s how to create an Excel to-do list, complete with checkboxes, task sorting, and more.

Table of Contents

1

🤔 What Is a To-Do List in Excel?

We bet that creating an Excel to-do list wasn’t one of the “typical” use cases for the app Charles Simonyi—the brain behind Microsoft Excel—envisioned back in 1987.

But Excel’s columns, rows, and cells turn out to be a solid match for to-dos. Even if they’re not the most straightforward to set up. To make a to-do list in Excel you’ll need a few things:

  • ☑️ Form Controls to insert checkboxes into a sheet.
  • 🗂 Data Filtering to organize and filter tasks by their status.
  • 🔠 Data Validation to define data entry rules for cells.
  • 🎨 Conditional Formatting to change the appearance of cells.

All the components are here. All you need to do is figure out how to hack those features together (Dr. Frankenstein would approve). The good news is we’ve done the heavy lifting for you.

🏗 How to Create an Excel To-Do List (Step-by-Step)

Create a Blank Excel Workbook

Ok, this is an easy one. Your to-do needs a comfy space where it can grow long and lush. Here’s how to create a new Excel workbook with an empty sheet inside it:

  1. Open Excel and select Blank Workbook from the list
    • You can also use the ⌨️ ⌘/Ctrl + N shortcut.
  2. Right-click the default Sheet1 at the bottom if you want to Rename your spreadsheet.
Microsoft Excel Home view.
💡 Excel To-Do Tip #1: At this stage, you should also enable the Developer Tab that will let you add checkboxes to tasks later on. To do that, go to FileOptions (ExcelPreferences if you're using a Mac) ➡ Ribbon & Toolbar, and check Developer under Main Tabs.

Organize Your List into Columns

It’s time to organize your blank sheet into labeled columns. Adding task parameters is a great way to add context to to-dos. It’ll also let you sort tasks down the road.

You can format your to-do list manually or use the Format as Table option in the Home tab. But first, let’s add a few headers to those freshly minted columns. Here are a few ideas:

  1. ☀️ Date Added
  2. 🔠 Description
  3. 🗓 Due Date
  4. ⏰ Time
  5. 🚥 Status
  6. 🚩 Task Priority
  7. 🗂 Category
  8. 📝 Comments/Notes

With that out of the way, let’s add a touch of color. Select the rows and columns of your soon-to-be to-do, click Format as Table in the Home tab, and choose one of the available styles.

Applying the Format as Table option in an Excel spreadsheet.

Experiment and add your own parameters but keep things low-key. After all, you don’t want to scroll through dozens of columns to complete a task, especially using a mobile version of Excel.

Trust us, it’s not fun.

💡 Excel To-Do Tip #2: You can apply conditional formatting to cells so their color changes depending on how important a task is. Try assigning each task a priority on a scale of 1-3 and select one of the available Conditional Formatting options from the drop-down menu.
Microsoft Excel Conditional Formatting drop-down menu.

Enable Data Validation

Data validation lets you define the type of data you can enter into a cell.

Limiting your choices may seem counterintuitive. But it’s actually much easier to fill in details like task status using simple drop-down lists. Follow the steps below to enable data validation:

  • Select all cells in the Status column
  • Go to the Data tab ➡ right-click Data Validation.
  • Under Allow, choose List from the drop-down menu.
  • Choose the Source and click Ok to confirm.
Enabling Data Validation for selected cells in an Excel spreadsheet.
💡 Excel To-Do Tip #3: Try enabling data validation for other columns in the sheet. For example, the Task Category can include options like “Work” and “Personal.”

Add Checkboxes to Your Tasks

What good is a to-do list if you can’t “check” ( or “tick”) completed tasks? We’ve already enabled the Developer tab in the previous steps so you can now add checkboxes to the spreadsheet.

  • Go to the Developer tab ➡ click ☑️ Checkbox.
  • Select the cell where you want to add the checkbox.
  • Resize the checkbox and place it in the center of a cell.
  • Drag the fill handle to duplicate the checkbox across all tasks.

And that’s it! 🥳

Inserting a checkbox into an Excel spreadsheet.

👎 Disadvantages of Using Excel For Managing Your To-Do Lists

Excel Is Not a To-Do List App

Let’s make one thing clear.

It’s not that an Excel spreadsheet CAN’T act as an over-engineered to-do list. Quite the contrary. Excel is a powerful tool, but getting it to work requires a great deal of “figuring it out.”

Need a simple progress bar to check your progress?

Sorry, there’s none. Sure, you can insert a chart and come up with a witty formula to make it somewhat interactive. But the best online to-do apps let you track progress out of the box.

If you want to adapt an Excel spreadsheet to a task that’s not data entry, you need to hack together different features to get the results you’re after. And that’s not really “user-friendly.”

Of course, all that hacking and tinkering comes with a price.

Let’s say you’ve put together a few formulas and macros to power your to-do list. They seem to work just fine, so you get on with your work and forget all about them.

But the moment you start scaling your list, things get messy. The spreadsheet becomes laggy and unresponsive, formulas stop working, and you need to waste time figuring out what’s wrong. If you’ve ever used Excel, that scenario probably sounds all too familiar.

The bottom line is that Excel is NOT a to-do list app. It wasn’t designed to be one and doesn’t even have the basic functionality that’d make tracking tasks easier. And speaking of features…

You Don’t Get Any Dedicated To-Do Tools

Let’s start with reminders.

Excel spreadsheets don’t offer a straightforward way to set reminders out of the box. You can hack this functionality using Data Validation and other methods. But, as is the case with workarounds, it takes time and effort you should spend on getting work done.

Oh, and unless you’re an Excel pro, we wouldn’t put too much trust in those reminders anyway.

If you want to track tasks with multiple dependencies, you’re in for a ride. Unless you want to cram cells full of text, there’s no simple way to add sub-tasks to your to-do lists. Sorry not sorry.

It’s hard to imagine a to-do list that doesn’t use checkboxes or a variation of those.

Adding them to a spreadsheet? It’s possible, but you probably know by now that that’s a rather unintuitive process. That’s unless you love copying, pasting, and resizing. We don’t.

Of course, Excel is completely devoid of any advanced to-do features like drag & drop navigation, cross-linking, or a dedicated mobile app that’d let you easily—we can’t emphasize that enough—check tasks on the go. And it’s unlikely that things will change anytime soon.

Collaboration Is Not Exactly “Smooth”

Collaborative task management has proved its worth during the work-from-home experiment. And it’s still gaining traction as more teams are adopting a fully distributed or hybrid model.

While Excel does offer some collaborative features, they’re pretty limited.

You can’t assign tasks or tell what other people are working on in a straightforward way. There’s also no master view that’d make it easy to track team performance in a high-level overview.

A formula stopped working? Your teammate messed up conditional formatting?

It’s one thing when you make a mistake and your local spreadsheet crashes. But locking 10, 20, or 30 people out of a spreadsheet so you can fix a formula is a massive productivity killer.

And let’s not forget about Excel’s technical limitations. And there are quite a few

For once, Excel isn’t just one app that works across all devices. There are different apps for the web, desktop, and mobile, and not all of them support co-authoring. If you use a version that doesn’t, everybody else in the sheet will get locked out until you’re done with editing.

But hey, we’re not here to create problems but to find the right solutions. 🥳

🐑 Taskade—An Easier Alternative to Creating To-Do Lists in Excel

Creating a reliable to-do list for work and personal errands doesn’t have to be hard.

Erm… as long as you’re using the right tool for the job.

Taskade lets you plan, organize, and keep track of your to-dos the easy way. You don’t have to “hack” anything or create intricate formulas to stay on top of every task. With Taskade, everything works out of the box so you (and your team) can start getting work done in seconds.

Check this short video introduction to see how it works! 👇

But wait, that’s not all.

Taskade packs in a fine roundup of to-do features, including:

  • ⏰ Due dates and recurring tasks
  • 🦅 High-level overview of project status
  • ⌨️ Convenient keyboard shortcuts
  • 🔠 Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • 🎨 Text and checklist formatting
  • ↕️ Task sorting and drag & drop navigation
  • 🔔 Customizable push notifications
  • 🔎 Global search, version history, and #hashtags
  • 🔗 File uploads, embeds, and attachments
  • And much more!

You can easily collaborate and chat with friends, family, and team members by inviting them directly to the Project. Taskade also features dynamic project views that let you instantly transform your list into a board, table, org chart, calendar, and even a mind map!

A Taskade project visualized in a Board view, with to-do items in the center and a chat box on the right.

Taskade syncs your to-dos across all your devices without limits, even in the free plan. Our apps work natively on Mac, Windows, Linux, and mobile (iOS, Android). You can also access your to-dos in a web browser, just in case you somehow forget to bring all your devices for the trip.

A Taskade project visualized in the List view, with tasks in the center and a chat box on the right.

“Is that all?” Nope, but we don’t want to bog you down with all the features Taskade offers.

Where’s the fun in that?

Sign up for a free Taskade account and explore the app for yourself. Our free tier includes a ton of options so you can get started quickly without silly limitations.

Oh, and don’t forget to bring your team on board!

👋 Parting Words

Can you create a project task list in Excel? Sure.

Should you? That’s a question you must answer yourself.

If you like to tinker with formulas and macros or spend hours setting things out, you’ll enjoy the process. But if you just want to get work done, you should use a dedicated to-do tool instead.

Before you go… Check these articles next to learn more about the power of lists!

  1. History of the To-Do List and How to Get Yours Organized
  2. The Power of Checklists in Distributed Teams
  3. A Case For Hierarchical Thinking: Solve Complex Problems The Easy Way

Whether you have to plan an event or manage a project, a to do list helps you set priorities and track your progress. By listing out all the necessary steps in one place, you can break down your goal in small, bite-sized chunks and organize your time accordingly. 

In this article, you’ll find nine to do list templates in Excel. We’ll walk you through the steps to creating your own to do list with checkboxes in Excel and the most common uses for a to do list template.

We’ve also provided to do list templates in Smartsheet, a spreadsheet-inspired work execution platform that makes managing to do lists more collaborative and real-time than Excel.

Basic To Do List Template

Download Basic To Do List Template

Excel | Smartsheet

This basic to do list template can be customized to be a daily to do list, weekly to do list, or monthly to do list based on your desired time frame. You can write out your tasks, convey status, set priority, assign due dates and owners, and add notes for extra context.

Printable To Do List Template

Printable to do list template

Download Printable To Do List Template

Excel | Smartsheet

If you’re running around planning an event or need to hang your task list on a wall, a printable version of your to do list is necessary. However, not all Excel to do list templates are printer-friendly (the rows will often print on multiple pieces of paper). 

Be sure to look for a to do list template, like this one, that has been designed to print the whole to do list on one page. You can write in your tasks and due dates, and check the box when you’re done with a to do item.

To Do List with Checkboxes Template

To do list with checkboxes template

Download To Do List with Checkboxes Template

Excel | Smartsheet

Who doesn’t enjoy the feeling of accomplishment after checking a checkbox? 

This to do list template includes dynamic checkboxes for each task and once you check a box, the strikethrough formatting will be applied to the task. This allows you to visually convey which tasks are completed and uncompleted at a glance. 

To Do List with Drop-Downs Template

To Do List with Drop Downs Template

Download To Do List with Drop-Downs Template

Excel | Smartsheet

If you need to add similar details (like status) for many tasks, drop-down lists save you from entering the same information over and over again.

This to do list template features drop-down lists for priority (you can choose from high, medium, and low) and status (complete, in progress, or not started). And, when you specify that a task has been complete, that row will automatically turn green. 

Action Item List Template

Download Action Item List Template

Excel | Smartsheet

Also known as a rolling action item list, this template tracks specific tasks that must be accomplished by a certain person. Action items typically arise from meetings and should always be clearly documented. 

This action item list template has columns for you to track the date created, description, priority, assignee, due date, completion date, and notes for each task.

Group Project Task List Template

Group Project Task List

Download Group Project Task List Template

Excel | Smartsheet

While a to do list traditionally includes the tasks only assigned to you, there will be times when you need to see what your colleagues are working on as well.

A group project task list, or group assigned to do list, allows everyone to see which tasks they need to complete and when. This template boosts accountability by assigning each task to a person (or multiple people) and adding due dates.

Prioritized To Do List Template

Download Prioritized To Do List Template

While it can reduce stress to write down all the tasks you need to accomplish in no particular order, sometimes you need to quickly see the most important to dos and the ones that can wait. 

This prioritized to do list has drop-down columns, letting you organize tasks by high, medium, and low priority, or put the task on hold.

To Do List with Double-Click Enabled Template

Download To Do List with Double-Click Template

This template features VBA code, or a Macro, allowing you to simply double-click on a cell and a checkmark will automatically be added to that cell. You can then create conditional formatting rules around that checkmark. For example, in this template, the row will turn green and will have strikethrough formatting when the checkmark is checked.

Note: When you open the file for this template, you must “Enable Macros” for the double-click code to work.

Business Trip Checklist Template

Download Business Trip Travel Template

A to do list isn’t only helpful for project management. When you need to coordinate a business trip, a checklist ensures you have the right reservations, documents, and meetings before you get on the plane. 

This business trip checklist includes tasks for international travel, meeting with clients and vendors, and notifying coworkers and clients of your departure.

How to Make a To Do List in Excel with Checkboxes

By leveraging the developer ribbon and adding some conditional formatting rules, you can create a to do list with checkboxes in Excel. 

Here are the steps:

Set Up Your To Do List in Excel

  1. Add column headers to make up your to do list. You can add headers like tasks, priority, status, due date, owner, done/completed, or notes. For this example, make sure you have columns for “task” and “done” at the very least.
     
  2. Fill in your task and priority information.
     
  3. Highlight the column headers and in the Home tab, in the Alignment group, click the center icon to center the text.
     

Add Checkboxes to Your To Do List in Excel

You first need to enable the developer ribbon in Excel. If you already have the developer ribbon, skip to step 3. 

  1. Click File > Options and then select Customize Ribbon in the pop-up box. 
     
  2. On the right side, under Main Tabs, check the box next to Developer and click Ok. You should now see a new developer tab in your Excel file.
     
  1. Click the Developer tab, click Insert, and select the checkbox icon in the Form Controls section.
     
  1. Click the cell where’d you’d like to add the checkbox. A checkbox with some text next to it will appear on your sheet.
     
  2. Right-click on the text to enable editing. You can either delete the text or add something else. Resize the box around the checkbox once you are done. You can now drag the checkbox to any cell you like. 
     
  3. Once the checkbox is in a cell, click on the cell and drag the bottom right corner all the way down to auto-populate more checkboxes in the other rows.
     

Now you need to link each checkbox to a cell where it will display the check/uncheck status of the checkbox. The check/uncheck status will be represented by “True/False,” allowing you to create formulas and conditional formatting rules that react to the checkbox’s status.
 

  1. Add a second sheet to your Excel workbook by clicking the + icon on the bottom of the sheet. We’ll link to cells on this second sheet so the “True/False” status will be hidden.
     
  2. Go back to your first sheet and right-click on a checkbox and click Format Control
     
  1. Click Unchecked and click the icon next to the Cell link field. Go to Sheet2 and click the cell that corresponds with the first task (if your first task is A2 on Sheet1, then you’ll link it to A2 on Sheet2).
     

When the checkbox is checked on Sheet1, the value changes to «True» on Sheet2.
 

9. Repeat steps 7-9 for all the other checkboxes. 
 

Set Conditional Formatting Rules to Your To Do List

Now you can create conditional formatting rules based on the status of the checkbox. For example, you could change the font color to red for tasks that have not been checked or change the row color green for tasks that have been checked. 

For this example, we’ll add strikethrough formatting to tasks with a checked checkbox. 

  1. Highlight the first row with your task information, making sure not to highlight the checkbox. Then, in the Home tab, click Conditional Formatting > New Rule
     
  1. Under Select a Rule Type, select Use a formula to determine which cells to format
     
  2. Under Format values where this formula is true, you’ll enter your formula. For our sheet, we type =Sheet2!$A$2=TRUE. You’ll want to replace “$A$2” with your cell location on Sheet2 for the first task.
     
  1. Then, click Format and check the box for Strikethrough in the Effects group.
     
  2. Repeat steps 1-4 for all the other checkboxes, making sure to adjust your formula for each checkbox. 
     

You can now customize the colors and fonts of your to do list.

Common Uses for a To Do List Template

You can use a basic to do list template to track almost anything. Here are some common uses:

  • Baby checklist: A newborn checklist will ensure you have everything on hand for the baby’s arrival. Include items for nursing, diapering, bathtime, bedtime, and the home (like toys, mobiles, night light, etc).
  • Back-to-school checklist: After a long summer break, get back into the groove with a back-to-school supplies checklist. Make a different list depending on the age of your kids (they’ll need different supplies for elementary, middle, and high school).
  • Camping checklist or backpacking checklist: You probably won’t forget your tent, but other items, like a change of socks, can slip through the cracks. Create a checklist to organize all the items you need for your next outdoor adventure, including food, gear, and clothing.
  • Grocery list: Throughout the week, jot down ingredients that you run out of or meals that you’d like to make the following week. Save time by organizing your list by sections of the grocery store. For example, group all produce items together. 
  • Home inventory checklist: Organize everything house-related in one spot. Add weekly house cleaning, spring cleaning, maintenance, inventory, and other home projects to your checklist to make sure you’re keeping your house clean and safe every season.
  • Moving checklist: Stay on track before, during, and after your moving day. Your checklist can start as early as six weeks before your move, including things like planning a garage sale, ordering moving supplies, and notifying utility services of your move.
  • Packing checklist: While planning for your next trip, create a packing checklist to make sure you have everything you need before you leave your house. Make sure to include last-minute items like snacks, phone and computer chargers, and pajamas. 
  • Travel checklist: After your suitcases are packed, you still have to navigate taxis, planes, and hotels. A travel checklist allows you to compile all important reservation and flight information in one place, so you always know where to go and when.
  • Wedding checklist and wedding planning checklist: A wedding planning checklist ensures that everyone knows what needs to get done, so you can relax and have fun on your special day. Be sure to create a separate day-of wedding checklist, covering the getting ready stage all the way to breakdown. 

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Содержание

  • 1 Excel To Do List Templates (Free Download)
    • 1.1 Common Use Cases of Using these To-do list templates
  • 2 Steps to Creating a To Do List in Excel
  • 3 Adding check boxes in your to-do list
  • 4 To Do List Templates (Excel)
    • 4.1 Task To Do List Template
    • 4.2 To Do List with Due Date (Excel)
    • 4.3 Priority To Do List Template (Excel)
  • 5 Conclusion
  • 6 1. Simple Drop-Down Lists via Data Validation
  • 7 2. Conditional Formats for the Priority Column
  • 8 3. Conditional Formats for Numeric Priority
  • 9 4. Checkboxes using Form Fields
  • 10 5. Checkboxes via Data Validation
  • 11 6. Progress Bar for % Completed
  • 12 7. Gray-Out Tasks When They are Complete
  • 13 8. Highlighting Overdue Dates
  • 14 9. Autofilter and Sorting
  • 15 10. Create a Gantt Chart
  • 16 11. Drop-Down with Current Date
  • 17 Ссылки

You start your day. Plan some tasks. Write it down somewhere and start working on it.

When it’s way past your work time, you think about that to-do list (stare at it if you have it written) and curse the world for not having enough time in the day.

Sounds familiar?

If you are nodding your heading in agreement, you – my friend, are suffering from an acute condition of expanding-to-do-list.

Well, I am neither a brain doctor nor a self-help guru. I can not help you in overcoming procrastination and getting your work done.

BUT…

I can give you an Excel To Do List template that can handle your ever-expanding list (you will still have to make one and do all the work).

Jokes aside, I do believe it is helpful when you maintain a to-do list. I create one every morning, and on some lucky days, I also get the pleasure of checking off most (if not all) the items.

Excel To Do List Templates (Free Download)

Here are the four Excel To Do List templates you can download:

  1. A Simple printable Excel To-do List.
  2. To-do List with drop downs to mark a task as complete.
  3. To-do List where you can check a box to mark a task as complete.
  4. To-do List where you can simply double to mark the task as complete.

Excel To Do List Template #1 – Printable To Do List

This one is for people like me.

I like to print my to-do list and stick it right in front of my eyes and then work on the items on the list.

Here is a simple Excel template where you can fill the tasks and take a print-out. If you prefer writing the tasks yourselves, simply print it first and then fill in the tasks.

There is a separate column to mention date and comments (if any). If you don’t need it, delete these columns before printing.
как сделать to do list в excel

Download simple printable to-do list template

Excel To Do List Template #2 – With Drop Down List

If you prefer making and maintaining the To Do list in Excel itself, you are in for a treat.

Here is an Excel To Do List template where you can:

Additional Notes:

  • The weights are given as follows (in the pic below). If you want to change the weights, you can easily do it by changing these values. In the download file, columns G to J are hidden. Unhide it to change the weights.
  • To calculate progress using the progress bar, we calculate:
    • Total Score: Add all the weights for all the activities. For example, if there are 2 high priority tasks and 1 medium priority task, and 1 low priority task, the total score would be 14 (5+5+3+1).
    • Completed Score: Here we add all the weights for all the activities that are completed. For example, if out of 4 activities, 1 high priority activity has been completed, then the Completed Score would be 5.
    • % Completed: The value when we divide Completed Score with Total Score. For example, in the above case, it would be 35.7% (5/14).

как сделать to do list в excel

Download to-do list with drop-downs

Excel To Do List Template #3 – With Check Boxes

This template is exactly like the one with drop downs, with a minor difference – it has checkboxes instead of the drop-down.

You can mark the task as complete by checking the checkbox. If not checked, it is considered incomplete.

Here is how you can use this Excel To Do List Template:

NOTE: Be careful while adding deleting rows. Deleting a row does not delete the checkbox.

Download to-do list template with checkboxes

Excel To Do List Template #4 – Double-click Enabled

I find this version of the template the best of all.

It uses a small VBA code to enable the double click event where you can mark a task as completed by simply double-clicking on it.

NOTE: Since this contains a VBA code, it should be saved in .XLS or .XLSM format.

Here is how you can use this Excel To-do List Template:

Download Excel Template To Do List #4 – Double Click Enabled

NOTE: Since this template contains a VBA code, when you open it, Excel will show a prompt to enable content. You need to enable it for this to work.

как сделать to do list в excel

So here are 4 Excel To-do list templates that I find useful and often use while planning my work.

Common Use Cases of Using these To-do list templates

While I have shown you the example of common daily tasks, you can use these to-do list templates in many different ways.

Here are some use cases that come to my mind:

  1. Project Management Checklist: Since a project can have many moving parts to it, creating a daily or even weekly/monthly to-do lists can help you keep a tab on all the important stuff.
  2. Client onboarding checklist: You can create a quick client onboarding checklist and hand it over to your sales/customer executives. This will make sure a client gets seamless and complete onboarding experience.
  3. Grocery checklist: While it may sound weird to create one in Excel, I have seen people do this. This has become more useful now that we can order stuff groceries online in a few minutes.
  4. Event Management Checklist: Event management can get crazy and out of control if not planned well. A handy to-do list can save you (and others) a lot of time and money.
  5. Travel Itinerary and Packing checklist: I love to keep my traveling hassle-free by having a to-do list of stuff that needs to be done (bookings, visa, tickets, etc). You can also create a packing list to make sure you don’t leave important stuff behind.
  6. Blog Publishing Checklist: I have created a to-do list to make sure I don’t miss out on the important parts when publishing a blog post on this site. These tasks include doing grammar and spell-check, making sure titles are correct, images are present, tahs and categories are assigned, etc.

What goes into making the Excel TO DO List template?

There is no rocket science at play here. Simple Excel techniques come together to make it happen.

Here are the components that make these templates:

  • Conditional formatting (to highlight a row in green when a task is marked as completed).
  • Strikethrough Format (appears when a task is marked as completed).
  • Excel Drop-down Lists (to show the status in the drop-down).
  • Check Boxes (to mark a task as complete by checking it).
  • VBA (to enable double click event).
  • Excel Charting (to create the progress bar).

I hope these templates will help you become more productive and save some time.

I am sure you also have tons of To-do list success/failure stories and I would love to hear it.  I am waiting in the comment section 🙂

Other Excel Templates You Might Like:

  • To Do List template Integrated with Calendar in Excel.
  • Task Prioritization Matrix Template in Excel.
  • Shared Expense Calculator in Excel.
  • Employee Timesheet Calculator.
  • Vacation Itinerary and Packing List Template.

A to-do list is very important in ensuring that you conduct all of your important daily activities. One of the character traits of humans is being forgetful, so sometimes you can come to the end of the day only to realize that you forgot a certain task. A to-do list does away with all the possibilities of forgetting something that you wanted to do. Examples of to-do lists that you can have include shopping, work, assignments and targets to meet. Luckily, you can create your own to do list using Excel from your computer. This article shows you how you can create a to-do list with checkboxes using excel.

Steps to Creating a To Do List in Excel

To create your To Do list effectively, follow the steps below: 

  1. Depending on the to do list that you want to create, open Excel application and add relevant column headers. These may include tasks, priority, status, due date and done/completed.
  2. After creating the column headers, fill them with relevant information. This includes all the tasks that you want to accomplish in order of their relevance.
  3. At the Home tab, highlight the column headers then click on the center icon to center the highlighted text.

как сделать to do list в excel

Adding check boxes in your to-do list

Your to-do list is more fun and easier to accomplish if you add check boxes. These will remind you of the tasks that you have not accomplished easily. Here is how to add check boxes to your to-do list: 

  1. Click on File> options then select the customize ribbon located in the pop-up box.
  2. Looking at the right side where the Main Tabs are located, you will see a box next to Developer. Click on it, and you should see a new developer tab added to your excel file.

как сделать to do list в excel

  1. On the Developer tab, click insert and select the checkbox option.

как сделать to do list в excel    4. Click on the area where you want your checkbox to appear, and it will automatically do so.

как сделать to do list в excel

  1. To enable editing, right click on the text. You can use the provided text or delete them and add yours. You can also resize the boxes at this stage.
  2. After putting your checkbox in a cell, click on it and drag down to the other columns so that you can auto-populate the checkboxes.
  3. Create a formula that will help you determine whether the information put on the check boxes is true or false.

To Do List Templates (Excel)

как сделать to do list в excel

Download

Task To Do List Template

как сделать to do list в excel

Download

To Do List with Due Date (Excel)

как сделать to do list в excel

Download

Priority To Do List Template (Excel)

как сделать to do list в excel

Download

как сделать to do list в excel

Download

как сделать to do list в excel

Download

Conclusion

To do lists are very important in helping to work on all of your day’s tasks. Fortunately, you can create one using excel as shown above depending on what you want to achieve.

One of the best ways to learn new techniques in Excel is to see them in action. This post demonstrates how to add some fun and useful features to simple to do lists including drop-down lists, check boxes, progress bars, and more. The images show Excel 2016, but instructions are similar for Excel 2010 and Excel 2013.

1. Simple Drop-Down Lists via Data Validation

Many task lists include a Priority or Status column, such as the Homework To Do List shown below. It’s very handy to use an Excel drop down list for columns like these.

как сделать to do list в excel

To create a simple drop-down list, follow these steps:

  1. Select the cells you want to edit
  2. Go to Data > Data Validation
  3. Choose «List» in the Allow field
  4. In the Source field enter a comma-delimited list such as High,Medium,Low

2. Conditional Formats for the Priority Column

In the example above you will see that the values in the Priority column have been highlighted differently. This can be done automatically and is a great way to easily identify your high-priority tasks. Follow these steps to create the type of formats shown in the example above.

  1. Select the cells in the Priority column
  2. Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Text That Contains
  3. Enter the word high and choose the «Light Red Fill with Dark Red Text» option

The image below shows how to get to the correct option from the Home tab.

как сделать to do list в excel

3. Conditional Formats for Numeric Priority

If you want to use a numeric priority like 0-4, then you can use Icon Sets to display images instead of (or in addition to) the numeric value. You can see this demonstrated in the Simple Task Tracker below.

  1. Select the cells in the Priority column
  2. Create a drop-down list with the options 4,3,2,1
  3. Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Icon Sets > More Rules
  4. The image below shows you how to modify the settings for this rule.

4. Checkboxes using Form Fields

I don’t like this method. If you like to sort and delete and insert rows, form fields get all messed up. They may be nice for a spreadsheet layout that is not meant to be modified, but so far I haven’t found a to do list that I haven’t wanted to modify frequently.

The form field checkbox is found in the Developer tab shown in the image below. If you don’t see the Developer tab, go to File > Excel Options > Customize Ribbon and find and check the Developer tab.

5. Checkboxes via Data Validation

I wish Microsoft would add an in-cell checkbox feature (Apple’s Numbers software does it), but until they do that we have to come up with clever alternatives.

One method I like is using a data validation drop-down list because it works pretty well in Excel on touch-enabled devices, and it is also compatible with most versions of Excel and OpenOffice and Google Sheets.

The simplest checkbox to make using a drop-down list is probably just a list with a single character (x), or you could use a special character like the square root sign (√) that looks like a check mark in some fonts. In the example below, I’ve used this technique plus a small square ascii character (□,√).

Another approach that I really like is to use custom Icon Sets via Conditional Formatting. This isn’t as compatible with other spreadsheet programs (like Google Sheets) but it looks good. The simple Task Tracker Template shows an example of this:

  1. Select the cells you want to use for the check boxes
  2. Create a drop-down list with the options 1,0,-1
  3. Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Icon Sets and select any set you like
  4. With those cells still selected, go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules and find the rule you just created and edit it to create a custom icon set with the setting shown in the following image.

Another example that uses this technique is my Financial Plan Summary template.

6. Progress Bar for % Completed

In some of the examples above, you’ve already seen progress bars in the «% Complete» column. Now you’ll learn how to do it. Conditional formatting comes in handy yet again:

  1. Select the cells in the % Complete column
  2. Go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Data Bars > More Rules
  3. Modify the bar based on the settings shown in the image below

What a Progress Bar in Google Sheets? No problem. In cell A1 enter the % Complete and then in the cell to the right of it you can use the formula =REPT(«█»,ROUND(A1*10,0)). You can change the color of the bar by just changing the font color. That’s a pretty old trick for Excel users, but it’s something that will work in Google Sheets, too.

7. Gray-Out Tasks When They are Complete

If you like the effect of seeing your completed tasks crossed out or grayed out or both, you can do that fairly easily using conditional formatting.

In the example below, the first rule is applied when column A is equal to the special square root character. The placement of the dollar sign in the $A4 reference is very important in this formula because we want all the columns in the table to reference column A.

Also note that the first rule has the «Stop if True» box checked. That is why you don’t see the priority cell highlighted red or the % Complete showing a green bar in the example. When the task is marked as complete, I don’t want to be distracted by formatting that no longer matters to me. So I’m using the rule order to prevent the following rules from being applied if the task has been marked as done.

8. Highlighting Overdue Dates

When you have a Due Date, you may want to highlight the date when it is overdue. You can do that with a simple conditional formatting rule shown in the example below.

You can see an example of this in the Homework To Do List shown at the very top of this article.

9. Autofilter and Sorting

The little arrows that show up in the header of an Excel table or list are a result of turning on the Filter Button feature. If you don’t see the little arrows in the header row already, select a cell in your table (or the entire table) and go to the Data tab and click on the Filter button.

10. Create a Gantt Chart

Although a Gantt chart is a great visualization and management tool for projects, creating one from scratch is not nearly as simple as the other ideas shared in this article. The two most common ways to create a Gantt chart in Excel are (1) using a stacked bar graph chart object and (2) using conditional formatting. Visit my Task List Templates page to find an example that uses a chart object and try the free Gantt Chart Template to see the conditional formatting technique in action.

11. Drop-Down with Current Date

Update 10/9/2018 — I recently created a new wedding checklist where a user requested the ability to enter either a checkmark or the current date. To do this with data validation, create a list somewhere in the worksheet with the first cell containing a check mark unicode character ✔ and the next cell containing the formula =TODAY().

Then, use data validation to create a drop-down list referencing those two cells. This will allow you to select either a checkmark or the current date as shown in the image below.

To avoid having Excel show warnings when cells contain older dates, make sure to turn off the warnings and errors when setting up the data validation.

Небольшое Excel-приложение, эмулирующее простой To-Do-лист сделанную в духе матрицы Эйзенхауэра.

Позволяет наглядно отслеживать задачи — что нужно сделать, что делается и что сделано.)

Задачи, в зависимости от статуса реализации, записывается в ячейку нужной цветовой зоны. Задачи можно переносить из одной зоны в другую — для этого просто нужно навести курсор на границу ячейки и перетащить, зажав левую кнопку мыши.

Чтобы вообще удалить задачу, нужно просто выделить ячейку с ней и нажать на клавиатуре Delete. При добавлении/удалении, а также изменении статуса задач окрашивание ячеек происходит автоматически. Собственно, тут и понадобились макросы. 🙂

Тип данных во всех ячейках на листе — многострочный текст. Используйте комбинацию Alt + Enter, чтобы создавать заметки из двух-трёх строк.

Рабочая область разделена на 4 зоны:

  • Зелёная — важно и несрочно — планируемые важные задачи. Самый главный квадрант. Спокойное планомерное выполнение задач из этой области ведёт к достижению целей.
  • Жёлтая — важно и срочно — текущие задачи, которые необходимо выполнить прямо сейчас. Необходимо всячески стремиться, чтобы этот квадрант был пустым, т.е. откладывать все второстепенные дела и выполнять важносрочные задачи.
  • Серая — неважно, срочно — Небольшие задачи, возникающие в течении дня и способствующие решению важных задач из жёлтой или зелёной области.
  • Чёрная — неважно, несрочно — несущественные несложные дела, которыми мы занимаемся лишь бы не выполнять задачи из других квадрантов.

В основной области автоматически выделяется красная подобласть. Её размер зависит от жёлтой зоны.

Следует обратить внимание на эту область. Она логически определяет центр и влияет на раксраску квадрантов. Значение ячееек этой области нельзя менять (по тексту всех 4-х ячеек макрос идентифицирует логический центр, если текст изменить, то идентификация станет невозможной).

Однако при этом разрешается перенести центр. Для этого необходимо выделить одновременно все 4 ячейки, навести курсор на границу ячеек и перетащить эту группу ячеек в другое место. В соответствии с новым расположением изменится расцветка квадрантов, которые изменятся в размерах.

Ссылки

Скачать excel-приложение «To-Do» с Гугл-Диска

Musadya

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November 5, 2011

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Other

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There are several to do list templates that you can find as part of my excel templates. For example in my daily planner template and gantt chart template. But, if you need a more simple and standalone to do list template, you can use this one. I called it simple because there is no time or date references inside this template. There are only task name and completion status that you have to fill. It is will be more suitable for kind of jobs or tasks that have to be finished without any strict completion time or date or to be finished within one day or short period of time.

There are two kind of templates available. The first one is a single to-do list where it is more suitable to be used for single person. Inside it, there are 26 rows that you can use to fill your tasks. There are no excel formula inside the table. Just type the number, type your tasks name, and type a completion status once you finished your tasks. You can put word “done” or type “v” or any other characters. Remember to leave the status column blank when the tasks are not finished yet. The reason why you have to leave it blank, because the completion bar on top of the table will calculate the percentage of finished job by counting the number of columns that is not blank. You can modify this excel formula to suit your needs.

The second one is the team to do list. Basically, it is an aggregation of single to-do list templates with additional summary where you can see accomplishment of any members in this team. For example, it can be used to monitor the performance for any voluntaries project that is held in one day. Or, it can be used to measure performance of its member for doing the same job within the same period of time. To use this template is the same with the first template, except you can switch between to-do list from summary worksheet by selecting it from the column name. You can download both templates below which is only can be opened if you are using Microsoft Excel 2007 or 2010.

  To Do List V1.0 (12.2 KiB, 9,649 hits)

  Team To Do List V1.0 (61.0 KiB, 6,970 hits)

Содержание

  1. How to Create a To-Do List in Excel
  2. 🤔 What Is a To-Do List in Excel?
  3. 🏗 How to Create an Excel To-Do List (Step-by-Step)
  4. Create a Blank Excel Workbook
  5. Organize Your List into Columns
  6. Enable Data Validation
  7. Add Checkboxes to Your Tasks
  8. 👎 Disadvantages of Using Excel For Managing Your To-Do Lists
  9. Excel Is Not a To-Do List App
  10. You Don’t Get Any Dedicated To-Do Tools
  11. Collaboration Is Not Exactly “Smooth”
  12. 🐑 Taskade—An Easier Alternative to Creating To-Do Lists in Excel
  13. 👋 Parting Words
  14. The Best To Do List Templates in Excel
  15. Basic To Do List Template
  16. Printable To Do List Template
  17. To Do List with Checkboxes Template
  18. To Do List with Drop-Downs Template
  19. Action Item List Template
  20. Group Project Task List Template
  21. Prioritized To Do List Template
  22. To Do List with Double-Click Enabled Template
  23. Business Trip Checklist Template
  24. How to Make a To Do List in Excel with Checkboxes
  25. Set Up Your To Do List in Excel
  26. Add Checkboxes to Your To Do List in Excel
  27. Set Conditional Formatting Rules to Your To Do List
  28. Common Uses for a To Do List Template
  29. Increase Accountability with Real-Time Task Management in Smartsheet

How to Create a To-Do List in Excel

Love it or hate it, Excel is still an impressive piece of code. For over 30 years, spreadsheets have been the go-to tool for all kinds of projects, from not-so-exciting accounting & budgeting to AutoShape art or… flight simulators. But in today’s article, you’ll learn something different. Here’s how to create an Excel to-do list, complete with checkboxes, task sorting, and more.

Table of Contents

🤔 What Is a To-Do List in Excel?

We bet that creating an Excel to-do list wasn’t one of the “typical” use cases for the app Charles Simonyi—the brain behind Microsoft Excel—envisioned back in 1987.

But Excel’s columns, rows, and cells turn out to be a solid match for to-dos. Even if they’re not the most straightforward to set up. To make a to-do list in Excel you’ll need a few things:

  • ☑️ Form Controls to insert checkboxes into a sheet.
  • 🗂 Data Filtering to organize and filter tasks by their status.
  • 🔠 Data Validation to define data entry rules for cells.
  • 🎨 Conditional Formatting to change the appearance of cells.

All the components are here. All you need to do is figure out how to hack those features together (Dr. Frankenstein would approve). The good news is we’ve done the heavy lifting for you.

🏗 How to Create an Excel To-Do List (Step-by-Step)

Create a Blank Excel Workbook

Ok, this is an easy one. Your to-do needs a comfy space where it can grow long and lush. Here’s how to create a new Excel workbook with an empty sheet inside it:

  1. Open Excel and select Blank Workbook from the list
    • You can also use the ⌨️ ⌘/Ctrl + N shortcut.
  2. Right-click the default Sheet1 at the bottom if you want to Rename your spreadsheet.

Organize Your List into Columns

It’s time to organize your blank sheet into labeled columns. Adding task parameters is a great way to add context to to-dos. It’ll also let you sort tasks down the road.

You can format your to-do list manually or use the Format as Table option in the Home tab. But first, let’s add a few headers to those freshly minted columns. Here are a few ideas:

  1. ☀️ Date Added
  2. 🔠 Description
  3. 🗓 Due Date
  4. ⏰ Time
  5. 🚥 Status
  6. 🚩 Task Priority
  7. 🗂 Category
  8. 📝 Comments/Notes

With that out of the way, let’s add a touch of color. Select the rows and columns of your soon-to-be to-do, click Format as Table in the Home tab, and choose one of the available styles.

Experiment and add your own parameters but keep things low-key. After all, you don’t want to scroll through dozens of columns to complete a task, especially using a mobile version of Excel.

Trust us, it’s not fun.

Enable Data Validation

Data validation lets you define the type of data you can enter into a cell.

Limiting your choices may seem counterintuitive. But it’s actually much easier to fill in details like task status using simple drop-down lists. Follow the steps below to enable data validation:

  • Select all cells in the Status column
  • Go to the Data tab ➡ right-click Data Validation.
  • Under Allow, choose List from the drop-down menu.
  • Choose the Source and click Ok to confirm.

Add Checkboxes to Your Tasks

What good is a to-do list if you can’t “check” ( or “tick”) completed tasks? We’ve already enabled the Developer tab in the previous steps so you can now add checkboxes to the spreadsheet.

  • Go to the Developer tab ➡ click ☑️ Checkbox.
  • Select the cell where you want to add the checkbox.
  • Resize the checkbox and place it in the center of a cell.
  • Drag the fill handle to duplicate the checkbox across all tasks.

👎 Disadvantages of Using Excel For Managing Your To-Do Lists

Excel Is Not a To-Do List App

Let’s make one thing clear.

It’s not that an Excel spreadsheet CAN’T act as an over-engineered to-do list. Quite the contrary. Excel is a powerful tool, but getting it to work requires a great deal of “figuring it out.”

Need a simple progress bar to check your progress?

Sorry, there’s none. Sure, you can insert a chart and come up with a witty formula to make it somewhat interactive. But the best online to-do apps let you track progress out of the box.

If you want to adapt an Excel spreadsheet to a task that’s not data entry, you need to hack together different features to get the results you’re after. And that’s not really “user-friendly.”

Of course, all that hacking and tinkering comes with a price.

Let’s say you’ve put together a few formulas and macros to power your to-do list. They seem to work just fine, so you get on with your work and forget all about them.

But the moment you start scaling your list, things get messy. The spreadsheet becomes laggy and unresponsive, formulas stop working, and you need to waste time figuring out what’s wrong. If you’ve ever used Excel, that scenario probably sounds all too familiar.

The bottom line is that Excel is NOT a to-do list app. It wasn’t designed to be one and doesn’t even have the basic functionality that’d make tracking tasks easier. And speaking of features…

You Don’t Get Any Dedicated To-Do Tools

Let’s start with reminders.

Excel spreadsheets don’t offer a straightforward way to set reminders out of the box. You can hack this functionality using Data Validation and other methods. But, as is the case with workarounds, it takes time and effort you should spend on getting work done.

Oh, and unless you’re an Excel pro, we wouldn’t put too much trust in those reminders anyway.

If you want to track tasks with multiple dependencies, you’re in for a ride. Unless you want to cram cells full of text, there’s no simple way to add sub-tasks to your to-do lists. Sorry not sorry.

It’s hard to imagine a to-do list that doesn’t use checkboxes or a variation of those.

Adding them to a spreadsheet? It’s possible, but you probably know by now that that’s a rather unintuitive process. That’s unless you love copying, pasting, and resizing. We don’t.

Of course, Excel is completely devoid of any advanced to-do features like drag & drop navigation, cross-linking, or a dedicated mobile app that’d let you easily—we can’t emphasize that enough—check tasks on the go. And it’s unlikely that things will change anytime soon.

Collaboration Is Not Exactly “Smooth”

Collaborative task management has proved its worth during the work-from-home experiment. And it’s still gaining traction as more teams are adopting a fully distributed or hybrid model.

While Excel does offer some collaborative features, they’re pretty limited.

You can’t assign tasks or tell what other people are working on in a straightforward way. There’s also no master view that’d make it easy to track team performance in a high-level overview.

A formula stopped working? Your teammate messed up conditional formatting?

It’s one thing when you make a mistake and your local spreadsheet crashes. But locking 10, 20, or 30 people out of a spreadsheet so you can fix a formula is a massive productivity killer.

And let’s not forget about Excel’s technical limitations. And there are quite a few

For once, Excel isn’t just one app that works across all devices. There are different apps for the web, desktop, and mobile, and not all of them support co-authoring. If you use a version that doesn’t, everybody else in the sheet will get locked out until you’re done with editing.

But hey, we’re not here to create problems but to find the right solutions. 🥳

🐑 Taskade—An Easier Alternative to Creating To-Do Lists in Excel

Creating a reliable to-do list for work and personal errands doesn’t have to be hard.

Erm… as long as you’re using the right tool for the job.

Taskade lets you plan, organize, and keep track of your to-dos the easy way. You don’t have to “hack” anything or create intricate formulas to stay on top of every task. With Taskade, everything works out of the box so you (and your team) can start getting work done in seconds.

Check this short video introduction to see how it works! 👇

But wait, that’s not all.

Taskade packs in a fine roundup of to-do features, including:

  • ⏰ Due dates and recurring tasks
  • 🦅 High-level overview of project status
  • ⌨️ Convenient keyboard shortcuts
  • 🔠 Natural Language Processing (NLP)
  • 🎨 Text and checklist formatting
  • ↕️ Task sorting and drag & drop navigation
  • 🔔 Customizable push notifications
  • 🔎 Global search, version history, and #hashtags
  • 🔗 File uploads, embeds, and attachments
  • And much more!

You can easily collaborate and chat with friends, family, and team members by inviting them directly to the Project. Taskade also features dynamic project views that let you instantly transform your list into a board, table, org chart, calendar, and even a mind map!

Taskade syncs your to-dos across all your devices without limits, even in the free plan. Our apps work natively on Mac, Windows, Linux, and mobile (iOS, Android). You can also access your to-dos in a web browser, just in case you somehow forget to bring all your devices for the trip.

“Is that all?” Nope, but we don’t want to bog you down with all the features Taskade offers.

Where’s the fun in that?

Sign up for a free Taskade account and explore the app for yourself. Our free tier includes a ton of options so you can get started quickly without silly limitations.

Oh, and don’t forget to bring your team on board!

👋 Parting Words

Can you create a project task list in Excel? Sure.

Should you? That’s a question you must answer yourself.

If you like to tinker with formulas and macros or spend hours setting things out, you’ll enjoy the process. But if you just want to get work done, you should use a dedicated to-do tool instead.

Before you go… Check these articles next to learn more about the power of lists!

Источник

The Best To Do List Templates in Excel

January 22, 2016

Whether you have to plan an event or manage a project, a to do list helps you set priorities and track your progress. By listing out all the necessary steps in one place, you can break down your goal in small, bite-sized chunks and organize your time accordingly.

In this article, you’ll find nine to do list templates in Excel. We’ll walk you through the steps to creating your own to do list with checkboxes in Excel and the most common uses for a to do list template.

We’ve also provided to do list templates in Smartsheet, a spreadsheet-inspired work execution platform that makes managing to do lists more collaborative and real-time than Excel.

Basic To Do List Template

Download Basic To Do List Template

This basic to do list template can be customized to be a daily to do list, weekly to do list, or monthly to do list based on your desired time frame. You can write out your tasks, convey status, set priority, assign due dates and owners, and add notes for extra context.

Printable To Do List Template

Download Printable To Do List Template

If you’re running around planning an event or need to hang your task list on a wall, a printable version of your to do list is necessary. However, not all Excel to do list templates are printer-friendly (the rows will often print on multiple pieces of paper).

Be sure to look for a to do list template, like this one, that has been designed to print the whole to do list on one page. You can write in your tasks and due dates, and check the box when you’re done with a to do item.

To Do List with Checkboxes Template

Download To Do List with Checkboxes Template

Who doesn’t enjoy the feeling of accomplishment after checking a checkbox?

This to do list template includes dynamic checkboxes for each task and once you check a box, the strikethrough formatting will be applied to the task. This allows you to visually convey which tasks are completed and uncompleted at a glance.

To Do List with Drop-Downs Template

Download To Do List with Drop-Downs Template

If you need to add similar details (like status) for many tasks, drop-down lists save you from entering the same information over and over again.

This to do list template features drop-down lists for priority (you can choose from high, medium, and low) and status (complete, in progress, or not started). And, when you specify that a task has been complete, that row will automatically turn green.

Action Item List Template

Download Action Item List Template

Also known as a rolling action item list, this template tracks specific tasks that must be accomplished by a certain person. Action items typically arise from meetings and should always be clearly documented.

This action item list template has columns for you to track the date created, description, priority, assignee, due date, completion date, and notes for each task.

Group Project Task List Template

Download Group Project Task List Template

While a to do list traditionally includes the tasks only assigned to you, there will be times when you need to see what your colleagues are working on as well.

A group project task list, or group assigned to do list, allows everyone to see which tasks they need to complete and when. This template boosts accountability by assigning each task to a person (or multiple people) and adding due dates.

Prioritized To Do List Template

While it can reduce stress to write down all the tasks you need to accomplish in no particular order, sometimes you need to quickly see the most important to dos and the ones that can wait.

This prioritized to do list has drop-down columns, letting you organize tasks by high, medium, and low priority, or put the task on hold.

To Do List with Double-Click Enabled Template

This template features VBA code, or a Macro, allowing you to simply double-click on a cell and a checkmark will automatically be added to that cell. You can then create conditional formatting rules around that checkmark. For example, in this template, the row will turn green and will have strikethrough formatting when the checkmark is checked.

Note: When you open the file for this template, you must “Enable Macros” for the double-click code to work.

Business Trip Checklist Template

A to do list isn’t only helpful for project management. When you need to coordinate a business trip, a checklist ensures you have the right reservations, documents, and meetings before you get on the plane.

This business trip checklist includes tasks for international travel, meeting with clients and vendors, and notifying coworkers and clients of your departure.

How to Make a To Do List in Excel with Checkboxes

By leveraging the developer ribbon and adding some conditional formatting rules, you can create a to do list with checkboxes in Excel.

Here are the steps:

Set Up Your To Do List in Excel

  1. Add column headers to make up your to do list. You can add headers like tasks, priority, status, due date, owner, done/completed, or notes. For this example, make sure you have columns for “task” and “done” at the very least.
  2. Fill in your task and priority information.
  3. Highlight the column headers and in the Home tab, in the Alignment group, click the center icon to center the text.

Add Checkboxes to Your To Do List in Excel

You first need to enable the developer ribbon in Excel. If you already have the developer ribbon, skip to step 3.

  1. Click File > Options and then select Customize Ribbon in the pop-up box.
  2. On the right side, under Main Tabs, check the box next to Developer and click Ok. You should now see a new developer tab in your Excel file.

  1. Click the Developer tab, click Insert, and select the checkbox icon in the Form Controls section.

  1. Click the cell where’d you’d like to add the checkbox. A checkbox with some text next to it will appear on your sheet.
  2. Right-click on the text to enable editing. You can either delete the text or add something else. Resize the box around the checkbox once you are done. You can now drag the checkbox to any cell you like.
  3. Once the checkbox is in a cell, click on the cell and drag the bottom right corner all the way down to auto-populate more checkboxes in the other rows.

Now you need to link each checkbox to a cell where it will display the check/uncheck status of the checkbox. The check/uncheck status will be represented by “True/False,” allowing you to create formulas and conditional formatting rules that react to the checkbox’s status.

  1. Add a second sheet to your Excel workbook by clicking the + icon on the bottom of the sheet. We’ll link to cells on this second sheet so the “True/False” status will be hidden.
  2. Go back to your first sheet and right-click on a checkbox and click Format Control.

  1. Click Unchecked and click the icon next to the Cell link field. Go to Sheet2 and click the cell that corresponds with the first task (if your first task is A2 on Sheet1, then you’ll link it to A2 on Sheet2).

When the checkbox is checked on Sheet1, the value changes to «True» on Sheet2.

9. Repeat steps 7-9 for all the other checkboxes.

Set Conditional Formatting Rules to Your To Do List

Now you can create conditional formatting rules based on the status of the checkbox. For example, you could change the font color to red for tasks that have not been checked or change the row color green for tasks that have been checked.

For this example, we’ll add strikethrough formatting to tasks with a checked checkbox.

  1. Highlight the first row with your task information, making sure not to highlight the checkbox. Then, in the Home tab, click Conditional Formatting > New Rule.

  1. Under Select a Rule Type, select Use a formula to determine which cells to format.
  2. Under Format values where this formula is true, you’ll enter your formula. For our sheet, we type =Sheet2!$A$2=TRUE. You’ll want to replace “$A$2” with your cell location on Sheet2 for the first task.

  1. Then, click Format and check the box for Strikethrough in the Effects group.
  2. Repeat steps 1-4 for all the other checkboxes, making sure to adjust your formula for each checkbox.

You can now customize the colors and fonts of your to do list.

Common Uses for a To Do List Template

You can use a basic to do list template to track almost anything. Here are some common uses:

  • Baby checklist: A newborn checklist will ensure you have everything on hand for the baby’s arrival. Include items for nursing, diapering, bathtime, bedtime, and the home (like toys, mobiles, night light, etc).
  • Back-to-school checklist: After a long summer break, get back into the groove with a back-to-school supplies checklist. Make a different list depending on the age of your kids (they’ll need different supplies for elementary, middle, and high school).
  • Camping checklist or backpacking checklist: You probably won’t forget your tent, but other items, like a change of socks, can slip through the cracks. Create a checklist to organize all the items you need for your next outdoor adventure, including food, gear, and clothing.
  • Grocery list: Throughout the week, jot down ingredients that you run out of or meals that you’d like to make the following week. Save time by organizing your list by sections of the grocery store. For example, group all produce items together.
  • Home inventory checklist: Organize everything house-related in one spot. Add weekly house cleaning, spring cleaning, maintenance, inventory, and other home projects to your checklist to make sure you’re keeping your house clean and safe every season.
  • Moving checklist: Stay on track before, during, and after your moving day. Your checklist can start as early as six weeks before your move, including things like planning a garage sale, ordering moving supplies, and notifying utility services of your move.
  • Packing checklist: While planning for your next trip, create a packing checklist to make sure you have everything you need before you leave your house. Make sure to include last-minute items like snacks, phone and computer chargers, and pajamas.
  • Travel checklist: After your suitcases are packed, you still have to navigate taxis, planes, and hotels. A travel checklist allows you to compile all important reservation and flight information in one place, so you always know where to go and when.
  • Wedding checklist and wedding planning checklist: A wedding planning checklist ensures that everyone knows what needs to get done, so you can relax and have fun on your special day. Be sure to create a separate day-of wedding checklist, covering the getting ready stage all the way to breakdown.

Increase Accountability with Real-Time Task Management in Smartsheet

Empower your people to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt as those needs change.

The Smartsheet platform makes it easy to plan, capture, manage, and report on work from anywhere, helping your team be more effective and get more done. Report on key metrics and get real-time visibility into work as it happens with roll-up reports, dashboards, and automated workflows built to keep your team connected and informed.

When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time. Try Smartsheet for free, today.

Источник

All of us juggle multiple tasks, at home and work. Be it hopping from meeting to meeting, or getting our household chores in order, we don multiple hats, several roles, and an endless list of tasks.

Amidst the vast scheme of things, we often tend to lose track of time, or tasks and end up missing out on non-negotiables. How do we combat this never-ending journey of running behind time?

Here’s a simple solution: create easy, to-do lists that feel natural, easy to use, and clear, and update your tasks and progress as you go.

If balancing personal life itself is huge, at work, things enter a whole other realm of complication. When you work as a team, you’ll need to collaborate, share and complete tasks together. When doing so, it’s important to divide the group target into individual tasks and check them off one by one.

In such a situation, you need a simple tool that helps you collaborate seamlessly, track individual and team progress separately, automatically update status without constant intervention, send reminders and serve as a digital project manager for your team.

In this article, we shall go over two categories of to-do lists, excel to-do lists and Stackby’s and compare the efficiency of each.

Excel — the Common Go-to for To-do’s

An all-pervasive tool, Microsoft Excel is quite the favourite when it comes to tabulating any data. Having a wide range of utilities, Excel is often a household name for categorizing numbers and applying a wide range of functions to categorize your data.

Excel to-do list are preferred by individuals and organizations alike, as they do not need the internet to function, are simple to learn and do by almost anyone, and have an array of functionalities.

Steps to Create Excel To-Do Lists

Let’s take a look at how we can create simple yet effective to-do lists on Excel, in a few easy steps without many formulae.

#1 — Open a fresh Excel sheet

Open Microsoft Excel and create a new blank spreadsheet. If you want a pretty basic to-do list you can choose the blank spreadsheet.

Open a fresh Excel sheet

Excel sheet

#2 — Fill in the Data

Whatever tasks you need to populate on your to-do list, categorize them under the following heads:

  1. Serial Number (optional)
  2. Date(s) — based on your requirement, you can choose to have one column for date, or two columns of dates, having the date assigned and date completed.
  3. Particulars (which can be activities, tasks, or items)
  4. Importance (degree of priority, varying from highly urgent, urgent, moderate, slightly important to highly important)
  5. Status (or, the status of progress)

Fill in the Data

Input Data

Once you have finalized the headers, go ahead and populate values. You may choose to create a to-do list for the day, week, or month. More often than not, our human brain works better with bite-sized information, so, it is advisable to create a daily or weekly to-do list, instead of a monthly to-do list. Bring the data to a proper format, by drawing borders, color coding the headers, and aligning the data.

Data Filled

Let us start bringing the excel to-do list to life. Starting with the ‘Importance’ column, you need to choose a column away from the table and vertically list down the options you would like to have under the ‘Importance’ column.

To set multiple options that get highlighted based on the data you feed, you will need to trigger the ‘data validation’ function. Head to the ‘data’ tab under the quick access toolbar and select data validation. A drop-down box appears, asking you to choose further. Choose ‘data validation’ again. Once you select the option, a task box opens up.

In the box, under the settings tab, under validation criteria, you will see the first-row item as ‘Allow’. The field contains a drop-down box, which when clicked on, throws plenty of options for you to choose from.

From the choices, pick ‘list’. After, head to the second field and you will find ‘source’, which means you have to instruct excel to find the data to be listed.

Click on the blank field under ‘source’ and the cursor automatically turns into a selector.

Head over to the column in which you typed down the options you want under ‘Importance’.

Choose the range of options you have typed.

Once you are done, click on ‘OK’. Once the operation is complete, you can drag the first cell under ‘ Importance’ down, so as to apply the same functionality to all cells selected.

Up next, we have the ‘Status’ column to be taken care of. It is good practice to put a tick mark against our tasks so as to know that we have completed the task. It feels natural, and easy, and can be comprehended without much effort.

In order to get the ‘check/tick’ mark, you are required to click on the ‘Developers’ tab under the quick access toolbar. In the ‘developers’ tab, choose ‘Insert’ and then click on the down arrow. You will see a box with several icon dropdowns. Select the icon beneath the ‘form control’ header, showing the tick/check mark. When you click on the option, the tick mark will instantly be copied to your clipboard.

Head straight to the first cell under the ‘Status’ column. Paste the copied check mark on the cell and delete any text that appears alongside the check mark. Resize the pasted check mark to fit into your cell. In order to copy-paste the tick mark to other cells, simply click on the corner of the cell and drag it down.

#5 Link Your Cells

In order to link your cells to each other, especially the ones in the ‘Importance’ and ‘Status’ columns, head over to the first cell under ‘Status’, right-click, and choose ‘Format Content’.

Once you select the option, a box opens up with a field called ‘cell link’. Click on the blank field and your mouse turns to a tool for you to select. Go to the cell immediately outside the first cell under Status and press OK.

Now, you have linked two cells. Repeat the same for all rows. Now you have an interconnected to-do list.

#6 Sort and Filter

Fill in the tasks you want to complete and populate your excel to-do list. Once you are done, sort and filter the data to get better clarity on the real-time status of tasks.

10 Free Templates of Excel to-do Lists

Your Excel to-do lists don’t have to be simple or bland. Microsoft Excel offers multiple templates for you to get the right look and feel to get on with your set of tasks for the day.

The following are some of the in-built templates of Excel to-do lists, which you can use:

1. Project Stages Template:

Access this template for dividing your projects and tasks.

Project Stages Template

Project Stages Template

2. Project and Time Management Template

Drill down your project into multiple stages, activities, task groups, and tasks and measure actual time and cost against expectations for all your clients/team members using this template.

Project and Time Management

Project and Time Management

3. Team Progress Tracking Template

Assign tasks to your team members, delegate ownership of each task, and track their progress. Share your feedback or notes against their progress and measure team progress using this template.

Team Progress Tracking Template

Team Progress Tracking Template

4. Money Management Template

Make your money planning simpler using this template.

Money Management Template

5. Weekly Task Manager Template

Stay on top of your productivity with this weekly task manager template.

Weekly Task Manager

6. Timesheets Template

If you are running on an hourly billed project, tracking time is critical. Do it right with the time-task tracker here.

Timesheets

Timesheets

7. Performance Assessment (OKR) Template

Set goals and targets for your employees, or team members and measure progress using this OKR template.

Performance Assessment (OKR) Template

8. Weekly Study Tracker Template

Have loads of portions to study? Worry not. Schedule your syllabus right and manage your progress with this simple to-do list.

Weekly Study Tracker Template

9. Fitness Tracker Template

Has the new year, new me driven you to the gym? Keep up with your fitness routine with this simple tracker.

Fitness Tracker

Fitness Tracker

10. Learning Tracker:

Are you a lifelong learner with goals for self-study? Meet them with a meticulous tracker.

Learning Tracker

Limitations of Excel To-do Lists

Although Excel is a time-tested tool for creating to-do lists, it is not free from limitations and here are a few prominent ones:

Not Collaborative

How do work together using an Excel sheet? Each person downloads the sheet and it goes round-robin. No two people can collaborate on Excel which is vital for teams working concurrently. Given the volume of work and variety of projects, multiple persons need to access the to-do list and update it constantly, which doesn’t work well in Excel.

Lacks Flexibility

Customising Excel to-do lists to your needs can be a tedious task. It invites the use of several formulae and a lot of time to bring about customization.

Formula Driven

Long, heavy formulae for customizing your to-do lists and drawing up charts to view progress can become sticky when huge data is involved.

Person-Dependent

Only a person who knows Excel like the back of their palm can make changes, spot errors, or draw up inferences from the available to-do list or task data. Others need to wait for the Excel-proficient team member to view inferences.

Stackby — An easier alternative to managing to-do lists in Excel

Let’s do away with Excel for to-do lists. It’s time to haul in a flexible, easy-to-use application that has several in-built features to manage individual and group tasks with minimum effort and time. Introducing Stackby — a simple all-around work tool to view, add, edit and manage all individual and team tasks. A mini project manager is at your disposal.

To-do lists Template

With this simple, seamless template, you can now add your tasks with a click of a button, simply add sub-tasks as you want, and assign categories, priorities, statuses and team members.

You can also add attachments against a particular task, view tasks in various views/formats, and also set difficulty levels for each task.

You can add sub-tasks via checklists & track progress with progress column type, add reminders on each task, collaborate with your team and get things done — all in a single place.

You can get a holistic view of tasks in all areas of work and life and measure your progress by looking at the tasks you have completed in a master reporting dashboard, such as Stackby’s to-do list.

Task Lists Template

If more than one person, most likely a team is working on diverse projects, you will need to organize them to ensure no incomplete tasks or duplication of work or lapse of time limits. You need to hold each person accountable and also encourage them for their progress. Do it all and do it right with Stackby’s task lists.

With Stackby, you can ensure peak productivity and task ownership in your company,  by dividing any number of projects into bite-sized tasks, tagging the owner of each task, enabling others to view the owner of each task so as to bring accountability, assigning due dates and allow access for each team member to update status real-time.

You can also categorize each task into task buckets or groups, in order to improve the visibility and calculation of results. As task owners, you can attach photos or files corresponding to your task so those who have a dependency on your task know exactly where to pick it up.

Stackby’s range of task management lists, have an array of products such as employee task lists, team project management tool, to-do lists, and more to ensure you and your team can focus on the task at hand and not worry about tracking or measuring.

Sample Project Tracker Template in Stackby
All task & project management templates

To Wrap Up

Stackby UI is simple, easy to use, and can be used by almost anybody with or without technical knowledge. It is for anyone and everyone, whether you are an individual or a professional working in an organization, or a small business owner juggling different tasks and roles at the same time.

Take your to-do lists, planning or even organizing games to the next level with Stackby’s to-do lists.

Lovers of list-making will find lots of options among our collection of customizable list design templates. From shopping lists and reading lists to wish lists and bucket lists, there’s a list template perfect for you to customize for your project.

list photo

Get your lists down with customizable templates

Who doesn’t love a list? Lists can keep you organized, or help you collect your ideas, or propel you forward on a plan. Take your list making to the next level with easy-to-use templates that you can customize for your exact listing needs. Use lists to keep track of your favorite hobbies and interests so you never run out of supplies or miss an opportunity to explore. Or deploy your favorite list template to keep track of who’s naughty and who’s nice when it comes time for celebrating an occasion. From brainstorming your next big idea to organizing your busy life, you can make the perfect list for you when you start with a customizable template.

You start your day. Plan some tasks. Write it down somewhere and start working on it.

When it’s way past your work time, you think about that to-do list (stare at it if you have it written) and curse the world for not having enough time in the day.

Sounds familiar?

If you are nodding your heading in agreement, you – my friend, are suffering from an acute condition of expanding-to-do-list.

Well, I am neither a brain doctor nor a self-help guru. I can not help you in overcoming procrastination and getting your work done.

BUT…

I can give you an Excel To Do List template that can handle your ever-expanding list (you will still have to make one and do all the work).

Jokes aside, I do believe it is helpful when you maintain a to-do list. I create one every morning, and on some lucky days, I also get the pleasure of checking off most (if not all) the items.

Excel To Do List Templates (Free Download)

Here are the four Excel To Do List templates you can download:

  1. A Simple printable Excel To-do List.
  2. To-do List with drop downs to mark a task as complete.
  3. To-do List where you can check a box to mark a task as complete.
  4. To-do List where you can simply double to mark the task as complete.

Excel To Do List Template #1 – Printable To Do List

This one is for people like me.

I like to print my to-do list and stick it right in front of my eyes and then work on the items on the list.

Here is a simple Excel template where you can fill the tasks and take a print-out. If you prefer writing the tasks yourselves, simply print it first and then fill in the tasks.

There is a separate column to mention date and comments (if any). If you don’t need it, delete these columns before printing.
A Printable Excel To Do List Template

Download simple printable to-do list templateDownload File

Excel To Do List Template #2 – With Drop Down List

If you prefer making and maintaining the To Do list in Excel itself, you are in for a treat.

Here is an Excel To Do List template where you can:

Excel To Do List Template Drop Down

Additional Notes:

  • The weights are given as follows (in the pic below). If you want to change the weights, you can easily do it by changing these values. In the download file, columns G to J are hidden. Unhide it to change the weights. Excel To Do List Template weights
  • To calculate progress using the progress bar, we calculate:
    • Total Score: Add all the weights for all the activities. For example, if there are 2 high priority tasks and 1 medium priority task, and 1 low priority task, the total score would be 14 (5+5+3+1).
    • Completed Score: Here we add all the weights for all the activities that are completed. For example, if out of 4 activities, 1 high priority activity has been completed, then the Completed Score would be 5.
    • % Completed: The value when we divide Completed Score with Total Score. For example, in the above case, it would be 35.7% (5/14).

Excel To Do List Template completion calculation

Download to-do list with drop-downsDownload File

Excel To Do List Template #3 – With Check Boxes

This template is exactly like the one with drop downs, with a minor difference – it has checkboxes instead of the drop-down.

You can mark the task as complete by checking the checkbox. If not checked, it is considered incomplete.

Here is how you can use this Excel To Do List Template:

Excel To Do List Template Check Box

NOTE: Be careful while adding deleting rows. Deleting a row does not delete the checkbox.

Download to-do list template with checkboxesDownload File

Excel To Do List Template #4 – Double-click Enabled

I find this version of the template the best of all.

It uses a small VBA code to enable the double click event where you can mark a task as completed by simply double-clicking on it. As soon as you double click on the cell, it automatically inserts a checkmark in that cell.

NOTE: Since this contains a VBA code, it should be saved in .XLS or .XLSM format.

Here is how you can use this Excel To-do List Template:

Excel To Do List Template Double Click

Download Excel Template To Do List #4 – Double Click EnabledDownload File

NOTE: Since this template contains a VBA code, when you open it, Excel will show a prompt to enable content. You need to enable it for this to work.

Excel To Do List Template enable content

So here are 4 Excel To-do list templates that I find useful and often use while planning my work.

Common Use Cases of Using these To-do list templates

While I have shown you the example of common daily tasks, you can use these to-do list templates in many different ways.

Here are some use cases that come to my mind:

  1. Project Management Checklist: Since a project can have many moving parts to it, creating a daily or even weekly/monthly to-do lists can help you keep a tab on all the important stuff.
  2. Client onboarding checklist: You can create a quick client onboarding checklist and hand it over to your sales/customer executives. This will make sure a client gets a seamless and complete onboarding experience.
  3. Grocery checklist: While it may sound weird to create one in Excel, I have seen people do this. This has become more useful now that we can order stuff groceries online in a few minutes.
  4. Event Management Checklist: Event management can get crazy and out of control if not planned well. A handy to-do list can save you (and others) a lot of time and money.
  5. Travel Itinerary and Packing checklist: I love to keep my traveling hassle-free by having a to-do list of stuff that needs to be done (bookings, visa, tickets, etc). You can also create a packing list to make sure you don’t leave important stuff behind.
  6. Blog Publishing Checklist: I have created a to-do list to make sure I don’t miss out on the important parts when publishing a blog post on this site. These tasks include doing grammar and spell-check, making sure titles are correct, images are present, tahs and categories are assigned, etc.

What goes into making the Excel TO DO List template?

There is no rocket science at play here. Simple Excel techniques come together to make it happen.

Here are the components that make these templates:

  • Conditional formatting (to highlight a row in green when a task is marked as completed).
  • Strikethrough Format (appears when a task is marked as completed).
  • Excel Drop-down Lists (to show the status in the drop-down).
  • Check Boxes (to mark a task as complete by checking it).
  • VBA (to enable double click event).
  • Excel Charting (to create the progress bar).

I hope these templates will help you become more productive and save some time.

I am sure you also have tons of To-do list success/failure stories and I would love to hear it.  I am waiting in the comment section 🙂

Other Excel Templates You Might Like:

  • To Do List template Integrated with Calendar in Excel
  • Task Prioritization Matrix Template in Excel
  • Shared Expense Calculator in Excel
  • Employee Timesheet Calculator
  • Vacation Itinerary and Packing List Template
  • How to Make an Interactive Calendar in Excel?

Download our free To Do List template to help you, your team, your family, or your organization. This template is already set up for auto filtering so that you can group the tasks by date, priority, status, etc. You also use the auto sort buttons to list the tasks in order by date, priority, etc. It is easy to print, so it’s nice for people who like to check off or scribble out tasks by hand.

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You can also use this to do list for a team project. For example, you can use the Owner column for assigning a specific person a task, and then email the spreadsheet, or use it collaboratively to keep track of your tasks and due dates.

for Excel and Google Sheets

To Do List Template

«No installation, no macros — just a simple spreadsheet» — by

Description

This printable To-Do List helps you get organized. It is highly customizable and requires only basic spreadsheet knowledge to edit or customize. It can be adapted for your personal use or used collaboratively in a team environment.

Update 1/9/17: When you select «Completed» from the Status column, a conditional formatting rule makes the font color in that row change to gray.

Related To-Do List Templates

Help Using the To Do List Template

The Vertex42™ To Do List template allows you the flexibility to use whatever codes, scales, or abbreviations you want for each of the columns. You can also delete one or more of the columns if you do not need it.

How to Use Autofilter and Sort in Excel

To edit the conditional formatting rules in this worksheet, go to Home > Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules and select «This Worksheet» from the drop-down. Learn more about conditional formatting.

In version 1.1.0, I added a few dynamic ranges that are used to populate the customizable drop down lists used for the Status and Priority columns. You can customize the items shown in those columns of the To Do List by editing the values in the Lists or Ref worksheet.

Status: You can enter values such as «Completed» or «In Progress» or abbreviations that you define yourself. You might also use this column to enter the percentage complete such as «50%» or «75%.» Note: If you change «Completed» to something else, you may also want to edit the conditional formatting rule in the table.

Priority: You might want to use a 3-, 5-, or 10-point numeric scale for this column, where 1 is the highest priority. Currently, the Priority column uses conditional formatting to highlight «High» red and «Low» blue.

PICK: This is an acronym that stands for Possible, Implement, Challenge, or Kill. See the PICK Chart page for more information about this useful lean six sigma technique. If you don’t need this column, just delete it.

Due Date: Enter values in date format. If the due date is earlier than today’s date, the conditional formatting condition will make the date red and display a red dot icon. If the due date is today, a yellow warning icon is shown. If you’d like the yellow warning icon to show up if a task is due within 3 days (including today), you can update the rule for the icons by going to Home > Conditional Formatting > Manage Rules. Choose the Icon Set rule and click on Edit Rule. Change the formula for the Green dot to =TODAY()+2.

Owner: The person assigned to this task, or the person responsible for seeing that this task is completed.

Project/Task: A short description of the task to be completed.

Notes: Add notes for more clarity or special instructions, comments about sub-tasks completed, problems, etc.

More To Do List Templates

  • Gantt Chart Template by Vertex42.com — For larger, more complicated projects, a gantt chart can be a great tool for creating a task-based project schedule.
  • To Do List Templates by Vertex42.com — Make sure to check out our other to do lists.

Список дел полезен для нас, чтобы отмечать задачи, которые были выполнены. Но знаете ли вы, как создать список дел на листе Excel?

Создать простой список дел с раскрывающимся списком

Создать простой список дел с флажком


Создать простой список дел с раскрывающимся списком

Вы можете создать список дел, используя раскрывающийся список. Пожалуйста, сделайте следующий шаг за шагом:

1. Выберите ячейки, в которые вы хотите вставить раскрывающийся список, и нажмите Данные > проверка достоверности данных > проверка достоверности данных, см. снимок экрана:

2. В проверка достоверности данных диалоговое окно под Настройки вкладка, пожалуйста, выберите Список из Разрешить раскрывающийся список, а затем щелкните кнопку, чтобы выбрать значения ячеек, которые вы хотите использовать в раскрывающемся списке, см. снимок экрана:

3. Теперь выпадающие списки вставлены в ячейки.

4. Затем выберите диапазон ячеек, который вы хотите создать список дел. И нажмите Главная > Условное форматирование > Новое правило, см. снимок экрана:

5. В Новое правило форматирования диалоговое окно, выберите Используйте формулу, чтобы определить, какие ячейки следует форматировать. в Выберите тип правила список, а затем введите эту формулу = $ B2 = «Завершено» в Формат значений, где эта формула истинна текстовое поле, см. снимок экрана:

Внимание: В приведенной выше формуле B2 — это ячейка, содержащая раскрывающийся список, и Завершенный текст, который вы хотите отформатировать.

6. Затем нажмите Формат кнопку, чтобы перейти к Формат ячеек диалоговое окно, в этом диалоговом окне щелкните шрифт вкладку, а затем проверьте Зачеркивание из Эффекты раздел, и вы можете выбрать один цвет для элемента списка дел, как вам нужно, см. снимок экрана:

7. Затем нажмите OK > OK чтобы закрыть диалоговые окна, и создается простой список дел. Теперь, когда вы выбираете Завершить из раскрывающегося списка, элемент задачи будет удален зачеркиванием, см. Снимок экрана:


Создать простой список дел с флажком

Вы также можете создать список дел с помощью флажка, при установке флажка рядом с элементом задачи, элемент задачи будет отформатирован как зачеркнутый, как показано ниже:

Пожалуйста, выполните следующие действия:

1. Сначала установите флажок, нажав Застройщик > Вставить > Флажок (контроль формы), см. снимок экрана:

2. Затем перетащите мышь, чтобы нарисовать флажок, а затем выберите ячейку с флажком, перетащите маркер заполнения вниз, чтобы заполнить флажки, как показано на следующем снимке экрана:

3. Затем вы можете отредактировать флажок, чтобы удалить текст, чтобы получить следующий снимок экрана:

4. После вставки и редактирования флажков вы должны связать каждый флажок с отдельной ячейкой, щелкнуть флажок правой кнопкой мыши и затем выбрать Управление форматом, см. снимок экрана:

5. В Управление форматом диалоговое окно под Control
вкладку, пожалуйста, нажмите кнопку, чтобы выбрать соседнюю ячейку, чтобы связать флажок, см. снимок экрана:

6. Затем нажмите OK, а затем повторите два вышеуказанных шага, чтобы связать каждый флажок с соседней ячейкой один за другим, затем, если флажок установлен, отображается ИСТИНА, если флажок не установлен, отображается ЛОЖЬ, см. снимок экрана:

7. Затем выберите диапазон ячеек A2: C13, в котором вы хотите создать список дел, и нажмите Главная > Условное форматирование > Новое правило , чтобы перейти к Новое правило форматирования диалоговое окно.

8. В Новое правило форматирования диалоговое окно, нажмите Используйте формулу, чтобы определить, какие ячейки следует форматировать. в Выберите тип правила список, а затем введите эту формулу = C2 = ИСТИНА в Формат значений, где эта формула истинна текстовое поле, см. снимок экрана:

Внимание: C2 — это ячейка, связанная с флажком.

9, Затем нажмите Формат кнопку, чтобы перейти к Формат ячеек диалоговое окно под шрифт вкладку, проверьте Зачеркивание из Эффекты раздел и укажите цвет для элемента списка дел по своему усмотрению, см. снимок экрана:

10, Наконец, нажмите OK > OK чтобы закрыть диалоговые окна, теперь, когда вы установите флажок, соответствующий элемент задачи будет отформатирован как зачеркнутый, вы можете скрыть столбец связанных ячеек, как вам нужно, см. снимок экрана:


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