Excel already keeps your data organized.
Let's go over how it can keep you organized.
In this Excel Tutorial,
we're going to make a weekly schedule in Excel
to keep you on track.
The first thing I want to do
is switch my view to Page Layout.
This will make it easier to see if I'm within a page
in case I want to print this later.
Next, in the Page Layout tab,
I want to set my margins.
And I'm going to select one inch margins.
Again, should I choose to print this later,
the one inch margin should give me enough space
to hole punch this and insert it
into an organizer, for example.
Next, I'm going to add blocks of time
along the left side,
starting with row 3.
And you'll see why row 3 in just a minute.
So I'm going to do half hour blocks
starting with 8:00 a.m.
Now, it's important to type out 8:00 a.m.
so that it's automatically formatted as time.
And then in the next cell, I'm going to type 8:30 a.m.,
and once I have those two,
then I can just drag down
to auto-fill the rest.
Now, I'm only extending this until 6:00 p.m.,
but you can, obviously, go to whatever time you want.
So back on my top row here,
in row one,
I'm going to insert the date.
So we'll type 3/25/2019.
And then in this cell right next to it,
I'm simply going to reference that first cell and add one.
And then I'm just going to copy and paste this down
to the next five columns,
ending with H.
And then row two, just beneath this,
we'll type the days of the week,
starting with Monday.
And then once we type Monday,
we can just drag this down to auto-fill
the other days of the week over to Sunday.
So next, I'm going to select
the row with the days of the week
and the time slots and all the area within that.
So really everything except for the dates along the top,
and I'm going to convert this to a Table.
When you use table formatting,
you cannot use formulas in the headers,
which is why we excluded the date field from the table.
And so we'll do this back in the Home tab,
in Styles, select Format as Table.
And we'll select a design here.
So I want to do this, not just so it looks better,
but should I later copy and paste
items from inside the table,
the formatting will be preserved.
And while we have everything here selected,
let's go back to the Home tab and format this
just so everything is centered
and the text will wrap, if need be.
Now, let's format these dates
so they blend better with the table.
And to make it easier,
I'm just going to highlight this row
where the days of the week are,
and use the Format Painter
to color my dates in row one.
So that helps them blend in better.
It colors them,
but we also lose the date formatting.
So with them still selected,
I'm going to right-click,
select Format Cells,
and from the Date options,
I'm going to select the one with the month and date numbers
and click OK.
Oh, and let's update this column header
to say Time,
and then we'll bold column A.
Next, we need to create tasks and meetings
that can be scheduled in our calendar.
To do this, I'm going to add another sheet,
I'll move it over here.
And we'll call this Activities.
And here, we can create a list
that we can reference in our table
for activities that we can schedule in our planner.
So we'll call this our Activities list,
and we can add things like Team Meeting,
Planning Session.
I usually have some one on ones,
so we can do like 1:1 with Sasha,
1:1 with Jamie,
and let's not forget Lunch.
And if you can't think
of all the meeting types at this point,
don't worry.
You can keep adding to this list later.
So I'm going to format this as a table.
And even though Excel automatically
assigns a name to this table,
I'm going to select,
open this up a little,
I'm going to select just the activities
excluding the header,
and I'm going to give this another name.
So let's call this Activities.
And the reason for this is so that over time,
as I continue adding activities to this table,
new entries will also automatically be included
in the Activities named range.
So let's go back to the calendar,
and let's actually rename this.
So 3-25 to 3-31.
So back here, let's select the entire area
where we would schedule an activity.
And then with this area selected,
go to the Data tab,
and select Data Validation.
So here, we'll create a dropdown list.
So from Allow,
select List,
and in Source,
we'll reference the named range we created.
So type =Activities.
And in the Error Alert tab,
uncheck where it says
Show error alert after invalid data is entered.
Now, if you want to limit your planner entries
to only items on the list,
meaning that no one can type in
anything that's not already on the list,
then leave this checked,
and consider adding a note in the Error Message
about updating the Activities list
with the new item.
But if you leave it unchecked,
it gives you the ability to type a new item
and not necessarily add it to your dropdown list
if it's a one time event.
And when done, click OK.
And now, you can schedule activities
simply by selecting them from the dropdown list.
For more tutorials like this,
click on the these links. Thanks!