How to Create a Schedule in Excel (Daily, Weekly & Work)

Creating a schedule in Excel is an efficient way to manage your time and ensure you meet your period goals and fulfil work commitments 🧐

Excel’s powerful features let you create outstanding customized schedules tailored specifically to your needs. You can make it as simple or as fancy as you like.

In this tutorial, we will see how to create clear and appealing daily, weekly and work schedules in Excel step-by-step. Download our sample workbook here to follow along the steps.

Table of Contents

Create schedule

Creating a schedule in Excel is extremely easy and is one of those tasks that you enjoy doing. Excel has such powerful features and flexibility that offer you ease and freedom to create amazing things.

The most commonly used method of creating a schedule is using templates – especially when using Excel. It has a variety of templates to choose from be it work, grocery or sleep schedule.

You can access it by going to File > New and searching for Schedule. Excel will show hundreds of templates that you can modify to your liking 🤗

However, if you want a more personalized approach, you can also create your own schedule. It requires more time and effort but also more customization.

We will see how to create daily, weekly and work schedules from scratch below. Let’s get into it.

Daily schedule

Let’s create our first daily schedule with step-by-step instructions below.

To do that,

Step 1) Open the workbook.

Step 2) Select cells A1 and B1.

Step 3) On the Home tab, select Merge & Center from the Alignment section.

Step 4) Type in Daily Schedule.

Step 5) In cell A2, type Time and Tasks in cell B2.

Step 6) Fill in your time slots in the Time column.

Pro tip

If you want to enter all time slots with a consistent gap in between, enter the start time and then drag the Fill Handle down the remaining rows. It will fill in the desired time slots for you.

Step 7) In the Tasks column, enter the activities you have to perform.

You can color code your schedule to personalize it more 🎨

To do that,

Step 8) Select the Daily Schedule cell press CTRL + B and increase its font size.

Step 9) Click the down arrow next to Fill Color and select Green.

Step 10) Select the Time and Tasks cells and paint them Yellow.

Step 11) Press CTRL + A to select the entire schedule.

Step 12) Click the Border dropdown from the Font section and select All Borders.

And your customized schedule is all ready!

Wasn’t that fun? 🎀

Weekly schedule

To create a weekly schedule,

Step 1) Open the Excel file.

Step 2) Select cells A1 through C1.

Step 3) On the Home tab, select Merge & Center from the Alignment section.

Step 4) Type in Weekly Schedule.

Step 5) in cell A2, type Time.

Step 6) In cell B2, type Monday and drag the Fill Handle till H2 to fill the days of the week.

Step 7) Enter time slots Time column.

Pro tip

Insert the first time slot – for instance 6:00 AM and then drag the Fill Handle down the rows till A20. It will fill in the remaining time slots of the day for you.

Step 8) Fill in your tasks and activities for each day in the corresponding cell.

This is what the schedule will look like:

Let’s now add other elements to the schedule to customize it 🤗

To do that,

Step 9) Select the Weekly Schedule cell, press CTRL + B and increase the font size.

Step 10) Click the down arrow next to Fill Color and select Green.

Step 11) Select headers row 2 and select Yellow color from Fill Color.

Step 12) press CTRL and select all the time slots.

Step 13) Press CTRL + B to make the time and days bold.

Step 14) Press CTRL + A and click the Border dropdown from the Font section and select All Borders.

And your customized Excel schedule is all ready!

How cool was that? 🤠

Work schedule

Work schedule is quite similar to the weekly schedule we created above with only a few minor changes.

To create a work schedule,

Step 1) Open the workbook.

Step 2) Select cells A1 through C1.

Step 3) On the Home tab, select Merge & Center from the Alignment section.

Step 4) Type in Work Schedule.

Step 5) in cell A2, type Time.

Step 6) In cell B2, type Monday and drag the Fill Handle till H2.

Step 7) Enter time slots Time column.

Pro tip

Insert the first time slot – for instance 6:00 AM and then drag the Fill Handle down the rows till A13 (only official hours). It will fill in the remaining time slots of the day for you.

Step 8) Fill in your work tasks, meeting and break times in the corresponding cells under the appropriate day and time.

This is what the schedule will look like 😀

To format your work schedule,

Step 9) Press CTRL + A to select the schedule.

Step 10) Click the Border dropdown from the Font section and select All Borders to add borders.

Step 11) Select row 2, press CTRL and select column A.

Step 12) Press CTRL + B to make the time and days bold.

Step 13) Now select the Work schedule cell, click the down arrow next to Fill Color and select Green.

Step 14) Select the header row and paint it yellow.

And your customized schedule is all ready!

You can color cells with breaks or important meetings in different colors to make them easy to read. Or use conditional formatting to highlight them.

Neat, right? 😎

Tips and tricks

Here are some tips and tricks that might be helpful while working with schedules. Let’s hop right in.

• Use the Freeze Pane option under the View tab if you want to keep your headers visible
• To fill your worksheet with repetitive days or times, use Excel’s Auto-Fill feature.
• Use conditional Formatting to color code different types of tasks to make the schedule more visually appealing and easy to read.
• If you frequently use schedules with the same template, you can save this schedule as a template. Press F12 on your keyboard or go to File and click Save as and choose Excel Template from file type dropdown. The file will be saved as Scheduled Template.

Conclusion

In this guide, we saw how to create different types of schedules in Microsoft Excel. Putting your to-do things in a schedule is a fantastic way to organize your time and boost productivity 💪

We saw how to create a daily schedule to list down the things you do in a day. We saw how to create a weekly schedule list so you achieve your weekly goals.

We also got around to creating a weekly schedule which helps you stay on track with meetings and reports to submit. the best part is you can use simple templates to create schedules in no time.

To learn more about schedules and templates in Excel, give the following articles a read:

The 9 Best Project Management Templates for Excel (Free)

7 Free Excel Spreadsheet Templates for Budgeting

The 7 Best Excel Templates For Any Purpose (2024 Guide)

We hope you enjoyed reading this article as much as we did crafting it! 🤗