Employee training tracker & calendar – tutorial & download

Imagine you are the head of training department at ACME Inc. You arrange training programs round the year to empower your team. It is hard work, coordinating between employees, trainers, department heads, venues and coffee machines. What if there is something to help you keep track of all this? I am not talking about getting you a shiny new iPad, you silly. I am talking about a tracker & calendar built in Excel that ties everything together (well, almost everything, you still have to fill the coffee machine.)

This is what we are going to build:

Please watch this 8 minute video before moving on. It explains how the workbook is setup and what it does.

[Watch this video on Chandoo.org YouTube channel]

Employee training tracker & calendar – how is it made?

Step 1: Get the data

The first step is to figure out what types of data we need. At the very least, we need 3 sets of data:

• A list of people
• A list of training courses

Let’s assume our data looks like this:

All of this data is maintained in Excel tables (named people and courses)

Step 2: Set up a tracker to assign people to training programs

Once we have all the data, we can create a tracker (another Excel table). This allows us to map people to various courses.

Error checking at tracker level:

When you map people to training courses, there are 3 possibilities:

1. The mapping could be duplicate
2. The course is over capacity
3. The mapping is OK

We can use conditional formatting to show these errorsin the tracker so that users will know if everything is ok or not.

We end up with something like this:

Step 3: Design calendar view on paper

We need to define goals for calendar view. Let’s say the calendar view should answer these questions:

• What courses are happening right now (3 month window)
• How many people have attended the courses?
• What is the total cost
• What is the feedback rating of the courses?
• Show summaries for individual departments or all

Next step is to sketch the calendar view. Here is what I came up with.

Step 4: Set up slicer & scroll bar form control

Using the instructions in introduction to slicers and introduction to form controls, we set up a slicer on department and a scroll bar to select month.

Step 5: Calculate all the necessary values for calendar view

This is the engine of our calendar view. There are a lot of calculations that go in to showing  various summaries and monthly values. Explaining all of them will take forever. Instead, let me summarize the key techniques.

• SMALL formula to fetch the courses scheduled in a particular month
  • Learn more about this technique.
• INDEX formula to fetch various values from people, courses & tracker table.
• SUMIFS (and COUNTIFS) formula to sum & count various things that meet conditions.
• SUMPRODUCT formula when sumifs won’t just get what we want.
  • Calculating average rating by selected department employees for a particular course
• TEXT formula to display currency values in the calendar view.
• REPT formula along with star symbols to show rating.
  • More on how to use REPT formula to show ratings
  • Create in-cell five star charts
• IFERROR, because #DIV/0! is not the prettiest value on your output worksheet.

Once the calculations are ready, we move to next step.

Step 6: Plug the values in to Calendar view and format

One all the values are loaded to calendar view (thru linked cells, of course), we need to format.

• Use conditional formatting to show borders, fill colors only if a cell has value
• Use conditional formatting to change the color of star rating depending on the slicer selection.
• Set header portion apart with colors and spacer rows.
• Clean up and hide un-necessary stuff.

And the calendar view is ready.

Download Training Tracker & Calendar workbook

Click here to download the training tracker & calendar workbook. Play with the calendar view, Examine the formulas in hidden Calc worksheet and change inputs to learn more.

Of course, it’s not that simple.

I have summarized only the key steps. The actual process of making this calendar is a bit more lengthy and time consuming.

To learn more about how this dashboard is made, consider enrolling in our Excel School + Dashboards online course.

This workbook & detailed tutorial (45 mins) is now part of Excel School videos.

Please click here to know more about the Excel School program and enroll.

More Excel dashboards & trackers for you

If you manage staff then you would love these additional resources.

• Employee vacation tracker & dashboard
• Project planning & Gantt charts in Excel
• Monthly activity planner template
• Team to-do list template