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.
15 Responses to “FREE Calendar & Planner Excel Template for 2024”
one thing i do differently for data validations when using a table: i don't use named ranges. i use the indirect function for the formula in data validation. one less step.
=INDIRECT("icons[type]")
What if you have more than one activity on any particular date? How will all activities be displayed?
Thank you
Hi Donna.. good point. My original file had a bug that prevented more than one activity per day. I have updated the file to correctly show multiple activities on each day now. Please try again by downloading the file.
How do I change the icons please?
You can adjust the icons from the customizations tab. To change the icon, go the icon column and press Windows & Period keys together to open up the emoji keypad. Select the icon you want.
Very well done excel, how would you make the Activity Planner include a start and end date of an activity?
Very good excel sheet but same question how can we add start and end date for example instead of writing all the annual leaves for example start date and end date
Thank you. You can use some more formulas and tricks to manage that, but frankly, you can (and should) use a free version of Google Calendar or Outlook to better manage such things.
Thank you.
Is it possible that the calendar automatically shows today's date highlighted?
Hello Chandoo,
Thanks for the effort. Very useful to me.
Umesh
Thank you so much for this! Is there a 2025 option yet?
Thank you so much for this! Is there a 2025 version available yet?
You can change the year value of the calendar to 2025 and it works automatically.
Thank you! do you know why when i save this to google drive it says "Unsupported named ranges will be removed" when I try to edit?
Hi, Very cool spreadsheet thanks! is it possible to change the automated colours used. For example making different icon options (anniversary, work, holiday) appear in different colours other then pale blue and orange for holidays? Thanks.