Here is a fabulous New Year gift to you. A free 2024 Calendar & Activity planner made entirely in Excel. This dynamic calendar workbook lets you:
- See the calendar for entire year in a single view
- Dynamic any month calendar with detailed plan view
- Automatic updation of holidays, weekends and activities
- Snapshot of upcoming activities
- Fully customizable – start on any day, any weekend, custom holidays
- Optimized for screen and print outs
- [Added on 23 Jan] – Support for multiple activities on any day
Click the below button to download the free 2024 calendar template.
Compatibility
This calendar is compatible with Excel 365. It uses modern dynamic formula techniques to automatically generate the calendar, planner and month views.
If you have an older version of Excel (such as 2019 or 2016, 2013) then please use this alternative version.
How to use the 2024 Calendar Workbook?
The calendar & planner file has 4 tabs.
- Calendar tab: See the 12-month calendar view + upcoming activities in this page. It also highlights any holidays, weekends and planned activities on the calendar in a different color.
- Any month tab: This page lets you see the calendar for any specific month in a detailed view. You can change the month from cell C3 and the calendar updates automatically. The calendar shows date, any activities planned in a neat grid view.
- Planner tab: Use this tab to set up your activities. Whatever items you list here will automatically show up on the calendar & any month tabs.
- Customizations tab: Do you want to change the way your week begins? Need to add some holidays or change the icons? Use the customizations tab.
How is this calendar made?
The calendar workbook has two main components.
- Calendar
- Planner
Calendar Generation
To generate the calendar, I am using the dynamic array functionality of Excel 365. We can use the SEQUENCE function to create all the dates in any given year.
For example, =SEQUENCE(366,,DATE(2024,1,1)) generates all the 366 dates in the year 2024.
I then used the same logic to generate monthly calendars for all the 12 months and adjusted them based on the week start option.
Once the monthly calendars are generated, then I highlighted the weekends, holidays and activities using conditional formatting.
Activity Planner
You can set up any number of activities in the planner table. I am then using FILTER function to filter out the activities for a given day and show them next to the calendar date.
Also, if “highlight activities” is enabled, then I am highlighting the calendar cells in a different color.
In the 12-month calendar view, I am showing upcoming 10 activities using FILTER function too.
Know more about these calculations
If you want to learn more about the calculations and set up of this workbook, please refer to these articles + videos.
- Dynamic array functions in Excel – introduction to FILTER, SEQUENCE etc.
- Conditional formatting to highlight values in Excel
- Data validation to select a month in Excel cell
- Excel tables – How to create a simple tracker in Excel
- Video: How to use FILTER function in Excel
Want 2025 Calendar Template? Click here.
Previous & Next Year Calendars: 2025 Calendar, 2023 Calendar, Free Excel Templates
7 Responses to “Project Dashboard + Tweetboard = pure awesomeness!!!”
I would like to see actual hash-tagged DM tweets go out to the specific information consumers. That would be an interesting way to communicate the key daily data to interested parties.
A Twitter-like secure application like Yammer might be a good fit with this.
For example, how about daily tweets to selected user groups (secure) that would display sales, bookings, cash receipts, cash disbursed and a second version that would show the same info for MTD, QTD or YTD figures.
@Dan, it would be great. I did not taught about implementing it on this dashboard because twitter is blocked to the whole intranet here. However, there's a discussion here about how can we send these tweets to blackberries (probably through e-mail) automatically. (I'd like to see this implemented on a jabber restricted network as well, but here it'll probably not happen)
The wrap-up versions you mentioned doesn't apply to my particular scenario, but on a sales tweetboard it would be a great tool indeed - choosing who will receive which message according to hashtags. I'll think on something, thanks for the advice. 🙂
(Ah, btw, I'm Fernando... 🙂 )
@Dan: That is a fun idea. Instead of tightly integrating twitter functionality with a dashboard, i think it would be cool if we have a "tweet this" button that users can click after selecting a range of cells. We can easily show a dialog with the concatenated output of the selected cells and ask user to edit the text and eventually "send to twitter".
For eg. you can select the annual sales figure cell and click on "tweet this" button upon which a dialog will show the value. Then you can pre-pend it something like "DM @boss look at our sales this year: "
@Aires.. thanks once again.
Wow it looks really good. Not sure though how much the tweet facility would help in real world project management, but certainly having a dashboard on a project should be a key deliverable when learning how to manage a project
The other use of this is during the software development life cycle especially when you have parallel streams of development and testing going on. Using a dashboard is a quick way for everyone on the team to see where the project is at and how it all fits together.
Regards
Susan de Sousa
Site Editor http://www.my-project-management-expert.com
Hi Chandoo,
I purchased the project management toolkit but the dashboard shown above with the imbedded scroll bars. Is it included in the project pack??
Thanks
Sue
The gantt chart section of this dashboard is similar to one I have recently created: http://xlcalibre.com/hr-dashboard-gantt-chart-traffic-light-reportIt has a similar approach with scroll bars, but has a couple of additional features. I've tried to incorporate a traffic light report element, and also allow the timescale to adjusted so that can view it by days, weeks or months.I really like the other tables that you've incorporated, I may well try to replicate them to improve my version!
I am a monitoring and evaluation consultant in international development, and one of the services I offer is to help non-profits and foundations develop performance dashboards. I often advise them to develop dashboards for ongoing programs, rather than for one-time or pilot projects, because of the time involved. I am trying to find out from a few people how long it takes you to develop a project management dashboard, and to what extent the indicators vary from one project to the next.