Excel Dinner Planner
If you're busy getting ready for a big family dinner today, you might find the dinner planner in this Excel workbook helpful.
You can enter your target dinner hour, and a list of food to prepare, and the planner calculates the start time for each item. I use it for our family dinners, and it's a big help in scheduling.
There's even a fancy Excel timeline chart, if you prefer visual overviews.
Enjoy your turkey!




November 27th, 2008 at 9:38 am
I'm sorry, this is just a little too OCD.
November 27th, 2008 at 10:44 am
Where's the the long bar at the top for "Brandy - drink"?
November 27th, 2008 at 11:30 am
Jon, "too OCD" -- is that even possible?
Doug -- good question. It's assumed as an on-going task, but I should add it for the benefit of the first time holiday cooks.
November 28th, 2008 at 8:06 am
Jon,
It won't be OCD until you see the pivottables and pivotcharts and reports that Deb shares with the guests.
November 28th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Dave, all the guests are required to sign an NDA, so those pivot reports will never be seen by the general public (whew!)
November 28th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
I prepared a timeline chart with all 325 steps required to prepare our dinner. It worked perfectly, and everything was great. Dinner was 21 seconds late, due to a serious underestimation of the turnip peeling time. But nobody complained too much.
Couldn't have done it without this tool.
BTW, does anyone know how to remove gravy from a laptop keyboard?
November 28th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Wow, good thing Excel 2007 has more rows, because Christmas might be even more complicated.
As for the keyboard, lick it?