Leave Planner

The development of this leave planner was inspired by 2 things:

1. One of them is the overwhelmingly positive feedbacks received from the free excel calendar template which we have been sharing with our mailing list since year 2009. They love the calendar and have requested a calendar that they show them who is on leave any time of the month.

2. The second event was the development of a dynamic Excel-based

Gantt Chart (some called it a project management template) for one of my clients.

The leave planner is a dynamic template that is capable of displaying the work leave taken by everybody in your team for any month. This is done with advanced formulas such as INDEX and MATCH. Combine them with conditional formatting, the calendar can highlight the type of leave taken in different colours. A scroll bar is added to facilitate the change of month with a mouse click. The template also have a marker that helps to mark out “today” in the table so that you can differentiate the leave taken from the leave to be consumed.

In an Excel template, maintenance (i.e. updating of records) is always a challenge without the use of complex formula. In our template, this challenge is resolved through the use of a table that is intelligent enough to include new records whenever they are added in the next available empty row.

It is a breeze now with the leave planner. You can now know your team’s availability instantly!