Free Meeting Scheduling Excel Template

How often do you ask friends, family, or coworkers which day is the best to get together? Whether it’s a meeting, party, trip, or some other occasion I find myself in these situations all the time. There are several apps and online calendars available to help you coordinate which day works for everyone involved. I used to use a site called Doodle all the time.  The problem with these services is they are not always free, they’re constantly changing and you have to keep relearning how to use them, you have to make an online account, and so on. So I did what I always do – I decided to make an Excel template to determine which day works best for meetings and events!

I used a lot of the same concepts and macro code from my Super Bowl Squares spreadsheet. When you first open the spreadsheet you are greeted by a simple, clean setup page. Here you’ll manually input the number of participants, meeting subject and description.

Next, you’ll enter the start and end dates of the days you want the participants to choose from. It’s very important that these two cells ONLY contain dates. To restrict a user to only being able to enter a date in a cell, go to Data > Data Validation. Under Allow select Date. Be sure to enter a custom error message so if a user makes a mistake they understand what needs to be entered.

When the user clicks Generate Schedule the Schedule sheet is unhidden. The schedule can handle up to 100 participants and up to 365 days. However, you probably won’t need all that so the macro will automatically hide all the rows and columns not needed to make it easy for the user to input their information.

A lot of good Excel tips can be gleaned from examining the event timing spreadsheet. Here's a quick summary of what can be learned by dissecting this free Excel template:

• How to add and use Option buttons
• How to use data validation to restrict entry in a cell to a date
• How to use data validation to restrict entry in a cell to an email address
• How to get the day of the week from a date
• How to use command buttons and assign specific macros to them
• How to send emails from Excel with hyperlinks
• How to use a formula to show only weekends in Excel
• How to use conditional formatting to change cell color based on cell value
• How to hide command buttons by macro

Download the Meeting Scheduler Template here.

Watch How to Coordinate Meetings with Excel

If you want to see how this spreadsheet works and some tips like how to limit a cell where a user can only input a date then watch the video below:

Try it out and let me know if you think it’s a legitimate replacement for Doodle, Calendly or whatever meeting scheduling apps you currently use.