Saturday, 9 May 2015

10 Amazingly Useful Spreadsheet Templates

10 Amazingly Useful Spreadsheet Templates To Organize Your Life

Excel Money Management Template

If you’re anything like me, your finances are scattered around a smattering of savings and checking accounts, with the odd credit card thrown in. Perhaps you’ve even got a mortgage. This makes it incredibly challenging to keep on track of your income and expenses. Sure, you could lean on a product like You Need A Budget. Or you could take this spreadsheet for a spin. Your shout.
spreadsheets-organize-finances

To-Do List

Visualizing what you have to do as a list is a valuable tool in increasing your productivity. There’s no shortage of tools on the market that help you do this. Personally speaking, I’m quite partial to Wunderlist. But if you want a simpler solution, check out this to-do list spreadsheet. It allows you to schedule tasks, set a priority, and get things done on time.
spreadsheets-orgainze-todo

Medication List

Got any long-term health problems? If you’re on a number of medications, you may find it challenging to organize what you take, the amounts taken, and when you take them. Thankfully, this spreadsheet takes away all the stress of managing your medication.
spreadsheets-organize-medicine

Travel Budget Worksheet

Are you planning a vacation soon? It’s easy to fall into the quagmire of expense that comes with traveling. There are flights, hotels and food to pay for, and everything in between. If you’re not careful, it’s really easy to find yourself paying more than you’ve intended to. Thankfully, this Travel Budget Worksheet makes it incredibly easy to keep on track of your expenses when you’re seeing the world.
spreadsheets-organize-trave

Checkbook Register

You don’t need a paper checkbook to take advantage of a checkbook register. In its simplest form, it allows you to track each and every incoming and outgoing payment, and then add (or subtract) that from a running total. This allows you to keep current on your checking account, and to avoid falling into the mire of debt. You can use paper for this, but why not try Excel?
spreadsheets-organize-checkbook

Home Inventory Checklist

If you’re moving house, or renting out one of your spare rooms on AirBnB, you probably want to keep track of each and every item you have. This home inventory checklist makes it easy to see what you own, and what’s missing. And all from within an Excel spreadsheet.
spreadsheets-orgainze-home

Meal Planner

If you’re on a highly restrictive diet, or if you’re just trying to cut down on food wastage, you’ll want to check out the meal planner spreadsheet. It allows you to organize breakfast, lunch, and dinner for a week, as well as your grocery list. And all from a single worksheet.
spreadsheets-organize-food

Project Schedule Template

If you’re planning a DIY project, or have a massive school assignment to get done, you might want to consider doing a bit of project management. Vertex42’s Project Schedule Template manages to transform each step of what you’re trying to accomplish, all in the form of a pleasing Gantt Chart.
spreadsheets-organize-project

Yearly Planner Calendar

Got a busy year ahead? The Yearly Planner Calendar spreadsheet allows you to visualize your schedule for months to come, whilst sticking to a single page. And there’s even room for notes.
spreadsheets-organize-year

Continuous Monthly Calendar

The Continuous Monthly Calendar is a bit like the Yearly Planning Calendar, but with one major exception. It doesn’t show any breaks between months. It’s all just one contiguous block. Just input the start date, and it will populate the cells with days and months.
spreadsheets-organize-continuous

Organise Your Life

Excel Pivot Tables Tutorial

Excel Pivot Tables Tutorial : What is a Pivot Table and How to Make one



Excel pivot tables are very useful and powerful feature of MS Excel. They can be used to summarize, analyze, explore and present your data.
In plain English, it means, you can take the sales data with columns like salesman, region and product-wise revenues and use pivot tables to quickly find out how products are performing in each region.
In this tutorial, we will learn what is a pivot table and how to make a pivot table using excel.
Excel Pivot Tables: Tutorial

Example uses of Pivot Tables

As I said before pivot tables are very powerful and useful. There are numerous uses of pivot tables that we can talk about them until Christmas.
Here are some example uses of pivot tables:
  • Summarizing data like finding the average sales for each region for each product from a product sales data table.
  • Listing unique values in any column of a table [learn more]
  • Creating a pivot report with sub-totals and custom formats
  • Making a dynamic pivot chart
  • Filtering, sorting, drilling-down data in the reports without writing one formula or macro.
  • Transposing data – i.e. moving rows to columns or columns to rows. [learn more]
  • Linking data sources outside excel and be able to make pivot reports out of such data.

Excel Pivot Table Tutorial: How to create your first pivot table

Let us make your first pivot table. We will use example data in the following format. Download the excel pivot tables tutorial workbook with the data.
Pivot Tables in Excel - Tutorial
Step 1:  Select the data
Select the data range from which you want to make the pivot table.
Insert Pivot Table in Excel WorksheetStep 2:  Go to Insert ribbon and click on new Pivot table option
To insert a new pivot table in to your spreadsheet, go to Insert ribbon and click pivot table icon and select pivot table option.
Step 3:  Select the target cell where you want to place the pivot table. For starters, select New worksheet.
Excel will display a pivot table wizard where you can specify the pivot table target location etc. Select “New worksheet” option and your pivot table will be placed in newly created worksheet.
Step 4:  Make your first pivot report
The pivot report UI is very intuitive and sandbox like. To make powerful analysis, all you have to do is drag and drop fields in to the pivot table grid area. In excel 2007, you can also control this by using the “Pivot table panel”.
The pivot report is divided in to header and body sections. You can drag and drop the fields you want in each area. The body itself contains three parts. Rows, Columns and Cells. You can use any fields in these areas too.
For the above sample data, I have set this criteria:
Pivot Table Settings - Row, Column, Header and content settings
And the outcome is this pivot report.
Example Pivot Report - Excel Pivot Tables
It might be a bit difficult to understand how this works. But believe me, if you have seen any reports or worked with any other reporting systems, then the idea of pivot tables, pivot reports and pivot charts becomes quite simple to you.
You can use the excel pivot table features to make a more complicated pivot report like this in no time.
Example Pivot Report - A very detailed Pivot Table with sub-totals and totals

Some useful tips on Excel Pivot Tables

  • You can apply any formatting to the pivot tables. MS Excel has some very good pivot table formats (and they are better in Excel 2007 and 2010).
  • You can easily change the pivot table summary formulas. Right click on pivot table and select “summarize data by” option.
  • You can also apply conditional formatting on pivot tables although you may want to be a bit careful as pivot tables scale in size depending on the data.
  • Whenever the original data from which pivot tables are constructed, just right click on the pivot table and select “Refresh Data” option.
  • If you want to drill down on a particular summary value, just double click on it. Excel will create a new sheet with the data corresponding to that pivot report value. (This is extremely useful)
  • Making a pivot chart from a pivot table is very simple. Just click on the pivot chart icon from tool bar or Options ribbon area and follow the wizard.
  • More Pivot Table Tips & Tricks

Download the excel pivot tables tutorial workbook and practice yourself

Click here to download the excel pivot tables tutorial workbook. [ 2007-2013 version of tutorial here]
The workbook has sample data and one pivot table in it. You can play with it to learn more.

Use Free Word Templates

Looking for free templates for Microsoft Word? While our collection is small, what you will find is professional. It turns out that you can't solve all the world's problems using Excel, so below are the templates that we have created for Word, including resumes, bill of sale forms, agendas, business cards, and more. Enjoy.



Word Invoice Template
Invoice Template for Word
Create and print an invoice using Word. This is a basic design especially for service-oriented companies.
Bill of Sale Template
Bill of Sale Template
- Professionally designed Vehicle Bill of Sale template.
- Find printable Car Bill of Sale forms from your state DMV.
Meeting Agenda
Meeting Agenda Template
Sample meeting agenda templates for business meetings, team meetings, PTA meetings, committee meetings, etc.

Letter Templates

Letter Templates

Resumes

Resume Template
Resume Templates - Two standard formats that work for nearly any type of resume.
CV Templates - For grants, science and academic positions.

Other Word Templates

Word Calendar Template
Word Calendar Template
A printable monthly calendar template for Microsoft Word. Includes 12 months on separate pages.
Sample Memo Letter Template
Memorandum Template
Write a formal or casual memorandum using one of our templates. Includes information about how to write a memo.
Gift Certificate Templates
Gift Certificate Templates
Create printable gift certificate templates for Christmas, birthdays, and other occasions.
Business Card Templates
Business Card Template
Professionally designed business card templates that work for the most common Avery, Staples, and Office Max business card products.
Recipe Card Templates
Recipe Card Template
Print your recipes on 4x6 or 3x5 index cards, regular paper, or card stock, using these free recipe card templates for Word.
Printable Graph Paper
Printable Graph Paper for Word
Print your own graph paper. Various grid sizes and formats.
Meeting Minutes
Meeting Minutes Template
Record detailed meeting minutes using a table-based format in Microsoft Word.
Field Trip Permission Slip
Field Trip Permission Slip
Customize a field trip permission form to send home to parents, including a cutaway section for emergency contact and signature.
Travel Itinerary Template for Word
Travel Itinerary Template for Word
Create a printable travel itinerary easily using the Word version of this template.

Even MORE Templates for Word

Although originally created for Excel, the following templates can now be downloaded as Word documents as well. You will find the links to the Word versions usually under "Other Versions" or below the download for Excel.

Excel Financial Calculators

Do you need more flexibility than online financial calculators can provide? Are you worried about entering your financial information on the internet? Download our free financial spreadsheets, designed for Microsoft® Excel®,and work with them on your own computer.
Our financial templates are designed with the user in mind. Although intuitive to use, each calculator also contains helpful information within the cell comments, and additional resources and references are provided on the individual download pages.

Featured Financial Calculators