Employee Scheduling in Excel: Overview and Alternative

If you are a manager responsible for job planning , then you know that creating an agenda and scheduling employees can be a very time-consuming effort, therefore a lot of modern managers prefer using scheduling software that is represented by a cloud of special add-ons or templates to be downloaded and opened by MS Excel to specialize its initially wide functionality. Such scheduling spreadsheets exploit original capabilities of this tool to maintain different kinds of ready timesheets, working schedules, calendars, etc. These additional applications are developed and distributed by:

• Companies that pretend to assure certain level of quality, and therefore require online payments to let you downloading their editions of scheduling spreadsheets (they also may service private orders to create tailored spreadsheets according to your requirements).
• Enthusiasts of MS Excel, who have designed their own planners for their business needs and now they are ready to share their templates with other users for free (such links can be found on special forums and blogs over the Web).
• Official community/web-site of MS Excel that owns a categorized collection of free applications.
• You can create your own employee planner to hit your exact needs. There are step-by-steps instructions on the Web on how to customize your basic MS Excel spreadsheets. If you become an advanced Excel programmer, you will be able to share your products as freeware with other users, or even sell these templates to support your family budgetJ.

Scheduling software samples differ by range and specifics of their functionality: from very simple ones (just some plain tables where you can enter names of your employees and some other associated attributes) to highly professional and automated solutions that enable you to build up complex rosters allocating staff automatically and performing some cascading calculations including staff wages, working hours, different indexes, etc. It is a practice that gives you a variety of options to choose from, but there are workflow spheres where you may need instruments to run time management in a more efficient manner.

VIP Task Manager is not an Excel-based application and it doesn’t support any templates, but it provides scheduling functionality that would be useful on the projects where people need real-time data sharing and updating. It features Task List mode that works like a spreadsheet to construct employees’ timetables, worksheets, timesheets and plain to-do lists. All the information is recorded in a special database, and therefore it can be simultaneously shared and reported by multiple co-workers.