How to Use Excel to Schedule Employees

Creating a schedule and scheduling employees can be a very time-consuming task, but if you use software that is already available to you, it can be much less complicated and frustrating. Using Excel gives you a variety of options to choose from, but using its basic features, such as creating tables with rows and columns, will allow you to organize your business to run more efficiently. Start creating schedules using Excel and see what a big difference it can make.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

1. Open up a new Excel file by clicking on the "Excel" icon on your desktop or navigating to it from your program files. Click on the "File" button on the top left of the screen and save a copy of the file to an appropriate area on your computer. This ensures that once you are done you can simply click "Save" and know exactly where to find your file. You can name the file something appropriate such as "Week of February 1" or something of that nature.

2. Type in the very first rows the day of the week, start with row number "1" and column labeled "B," you will see why in a bit. Type Sunday through Saturday, for example "Sunday" will go in section "B1," "Monday" will go in section "C1" and so on. Once you have completed this, go the first column "A." Start with column "A2" and type in the work times you want covered. For instance in "A2" type in "8:00 am to 9:00 am." You will keep filling times in as needed such as "9:00 am to 10:00 am" in "A3" and so on. The reason why you started in the second column and row is so that it lines up neatly. Now all of you have to do is fill in the names of employees working at different times.

3. Locate the cell you would like to enter the name of the employee who will be working a specific shift. For example, if Leon is working on Monday from 8:00 am to 12:00 pm, you simply put his name in the cells "B2 through B5." Keep filling in names until you have your schedule set, as you would like it. When you are done, click on the "Save" button to save your file in case you need to pull it up and edit it at a later time.

4. Highlight the entire schedule by left clicking and holding down on the left click button while you have it in cell "A1." Now drag your mouse outwards and downwards until you have the entire schedule highlighted. Go to your toolbar above and find the button at the top right that looks like a checkerboard. Click on the downward arrow to the right of it and click on the section that shows an entire four-piece checker board penciled in. This will draw the lines into your Excel worksheet when you print it. Without the lines it would print up with just the text, making it hard to see what corresponded with what.

5. Click on the "File" button and click "Print" to print up the schedule. If you notice that the file got cut off, simply reformat the page and select "Landscape" from the page layout section.