How to Create an Awesome Family Calendar Using a Spreadsheet
The digital equivalent to your erasable monthly calendar on your kitchen wall.
(Initially published on medium.com, 26-Mar-2025)
Do you remember the paper or erasable monthly wall calendars where all the family activities were posted? Are you still using one?
Any activity changes were the enemy of a tidy calendar. The paper calendars sure could get messy!
You can have that monthly calendar in a digital format for your family!
I like the simplicity of putting events on a calendar like a traditional monthly calendar that’s on the kitchen wall. But in today’s world of constant change and desire to have a calendar you can view on the go, the wall calendar just doesn’t work anymore.
We had a few iterations to get to our preferred solution.
Here’s how I digitally maintain our family calendar and how we arrived at this solution.
Update 09-MAY-2025:
Microsoft Excel Template Available
I created a Microsoft Excel template that you can purchase on Gumroad. Click here to check it out!
When We Started: Coordinating Calendars with My Wife
Before my wife and I had children, we did just fine by coordinating our calendars – usually just by speaking about activities and using our paper (the horror!) day planner, like below.
It was the mid-90’s to mid-2000’s. Coordinating calendars was easy with just the two of us.
Then, we had two kids.
By the time the kids reached elementary school, we were getting more activities added to our schedule — mostly weekends but some weeknights as well.
Over time, we juggled (not all at the same time, thankfully):
- Elementary school events
- Soccer practice and games
- Swim lessons
- Gymnastics
- Cub Scouts weekly meetings, den leader meetings, campouts & pack meetings
- Girls Scouts meetings
- Kids’ birthdays from family, friends and the above activities — refer to my article on special dates to see how I manage birthdays.
- College football season tickets
- Family vacations — typically tethered to the school schedules
- Work trips for me or my wife
- Weekend camping
- Work holidays
- School holidays
- Family & Friends’ social events
It was just more difficult with a paper day planner – and no ‘search’ function is included.
Coordinating became more difficult, so we made a change…
Enter the Spreadsheet Family Calendar (Version 1.0)
If you read my article about special dates (birthdays, etc.), you’ll know I use a mix of old school and new school. And I do something similar for our family calendar.
I started a simple spreadsheet to be able to view our upcoming weekends. It got more complicated as more events and schedule changes to events kept coming up.
It initially looked like this:
The focus was mainly to keep up with our weekend activities.
Color coding works great to easily distinguish related, repeated or certain types of activities.
I would print it and post it inside our kitchen pantry door.
Using this method, the comment column got quite busy. And, with weekday events getting more frequent as well, it started to get a bit too busy where clarity was needed…
Enter Version 2.0.
Family Calendar (Version 2.0)
Version 1.0 worked well for the first few years, but I found we were adding more and more info to the calendar, so I updated the format as shown below.
I tweaked it to be Version 2.0 and we’ve been using ever since.
I selected a portion of an older calendar and removed most of the details for privacy reasons, but you can see the format and intent.
Version 2.0 has several enhancements:
- I added the annual week numbers for reference (reference Column A).
- Each day was labeled with its own date. Spreadsheet formulas make this easy to do each year by updating the first Monday on the calendar — even for leap years.
- I added the French and Spanish for days of the week as the kids were taking foreign languages at school (Reference rows 1 & 2).
- I removed the comment column and added dedicated columns for Saturday and Sunday.
- I added a “Time From” column (Column K above) that calculates how many weeks until an activity will come up. The version above shows it in negative weeks as it’s calculated based on the Excel function TODAY() and these events are from 2022, but you get the point. It’s very useful when looking ahead to say “It’s only 12 more weeks until summer vacation”.
- We add additional rows within a week as necessary to expand the weekly content, as you can see in week #7 above.
- I consistently use color-coding of events to further highlight events and their multi-day duration. It helps see things in the broader perspective and how each relates to other events.
Friends ask
“Why bother?! Why not just use a shared Google calendar or Microsoft Outlook calendar?”
Wait, you mean like this below?
My response:
Online digital calendars aren’t set up to view the bigger picture in a concise manner.
The Microsoft Outlook calendar screenshot above has only four weeks — and is just too busy with every daily calendar event.
Even if it’s a separate shared calendar with just your family events, I prefer the concise format I can get with our spreadsheet version — and the formatting flexibility we have.
The Version 2.0 image above has nine weeks and is limited to key family events – it’s showing more useful concise information to me than the Outlook calendar — and it’s more easily read by my kids.
The simplicity is what makes the Family Calendar Spreadsheet work for us. Information presented concisely in a format that even younger kids can understand.
2025 Calendar Year Example
Below is a whole year for us. For privacy reasons, it isn’t meant to be legible here, but it is shown to illustrate how easy it is to view medium-term and long-term durations. You could print this 11 x 17 if you wanted, but I’d recommend you use two pages if you do that.
It’s quite concise, compared to what you would see with either a typical wall calendar or a digital calendar on your phone or computer.
Selecting ranges of cells in Microsoft Excel for printing the three semesters means each prints legibly on a letter-size page — both for PDF and hard-copy.
To illustrate how to view an entire year in three pages, here are blurred versions of our current 2025 semester calendars:
2025-Spring:
2025-Summer:
2025-Fall:
Since I like night photography, I add the black boxes — those identify each ‘New Moon’. You can put whatever you want on your calendar.
Each are printed letter size. It’s great to see the whole time period with color codes and notes with the same information you would have seen when your family used a monthly wall calendar.
This becomes our family wall calendar.
Looking Longer Term
We have used this family calendar format for years. It’s a great way to start to look ahead for the next year(s) and note your commitments.
Example: An Extended Long Term View
In 2016, my wife’s job transferred our family overseas for a two year assignment to Scotland. It was a great experience.
Having two previous expat assignments, we knew the time flies quickly – just like it does with young kids at any location.
So, I made one spreadsheet tab for the entire assignment, so we could plan out our time and adventures to maximize the opportunity living overseas.
Don’t laugh, but that’s only 104 weekends. Once you factor in obligations for school, family, etc, you might have 40–55 weekends remaining. So much time get allocated/spoken for quickly.
By using a broader timeline calendar covering the entire 24 months (printed over 11 x 17 pages, in this instance when it was the full time period), we could see what time we had available.
It enabled us to make plans for each school holiday period, summers, weekend trips out of town.
Seeing the entire assignment duration in one view helped focus our efforts to make the most of the time we were overseas.
We did so much and it was a great experience for the entire family.
That became clearer after chatting with some expat friends who were leaving to go home. They had been in Scotland for five years.
I said something like “Well, you must be ready to go home as I assume you’ve done everything you could have hoped to do while you’ve been here five years.”
His response was something like “No, not really, we didn’t do as much as we could have.” Wow. I felt so bad for my comment and for them and their missed opportunity.
Pro Tip: If you get the opportunity to live in a new city, state or country, plan and make the most of it!
How the Family Calendar is Maintained and Communicated
I share the latest calendar regularly with the family; this includes a hard-copy print that is posted inside the kitchen pantry door.
I have a “PDF Family Calendar and Send Out” calendar reminder in my Microsoft Outlook Calendar for each Monday morning.
Before I email the PDF to my ‘family’ group email, I do a few things:
- Hide the previous week’s rows, so we are always looking forward.
- Make any edits, if there are changes from the previous week.
- Print each semester to individual PDF file and label as such, typically:
- Family-Calendar-<print-date>-<semester>-2025, as shown below
As the current time period reaches a shorter length, I may combine it with the next one — a main goal is to keep visibility of our upcoming medium and long-term calendar commitments – with the intent to print the time period to fill a letter-size page.
We keep a hard-copy print inside the kitchen pantry door and I replace it as needed. It’s available for quick reference in the house, but everyone has the latest PDF version in email each week.
Recap
Using a spreadsheet calendar like mine enables you to see and review your family’s calendar commitments across a multi-month period in a very concise way — I don’t think online calendar apps can present the info in the same way.
Given the coincidence of school semester use in our house and calendar prints scaled to letter-size paper, the use of semesters (Spring, Summer & Fall) work great to print certain time periods for medium- and long-term calendar review.
It works for us because we use it for main family-related activities, not all daily activities that can fill our work or school digital calendars.
Key takeaways
- Viewing seasonal (school semester) periods in a concise manner is great for overall planning.
- Our family calendar provides a great way to check our commitments and available dates for invitations and new activities.
- Our family calendar doesn’t get swamped with all the other digital appointments in our lives.
- Each year is on a different worksheet tab. It acts as a family record for various events and activities for each year.
- Periodic distribution and printing keeps everyone informed. Email PDF’s each week. Print new immediate calendar (next 3 months) and put inside kitchen cabinet door for quick reference when having discussions. Easy to check at dinner to see what’s coming up if we are discussing other potential family activities.
- Countdown reference is great to remind ourselves how much time is left until a key activity.
- Setting up the next year and populating it with the typical events helps us work around known commitments when planning. We already have our 2026 calendar started as school calendars for the 2025–2026 school year are published.
- Once you set up one calendar, it’s easy to maintain and create future years.
Enjoy Life and Thanks for Reading,
-Jeff
