How to organize meetings in Excel

Organizing meetings, tasks and deadlines is one of the most important processes within any company, and it’s common to use spreadsheets to manage it. However, messy formulas and mistyping can routinely cause disorganization.

To help you avoid these problems, we’ll teach you how to organize your company’s meetings using Excel.

Walkthrough:

1º) Create a meeting spreadsheet, name it “Meetings”, and its columns can be:

• Event (Meeting);
• Date;
• Client;
• Done;
• Owner.

NOTE: We recommend using the numbers “0” and “1” in the “Done” column, with “0” for not completed and “1” for completed.

2º) Create an auxiliary tab, name it “Filter” and create the columns:

• Event;
• Date;
• Client;
• Current date.

3º) In the “Event” column on the “Filter” table, type the following filter formula: =FILTER (Meetings!A2:C11;(Meetings! C:C=”Client1”))

Formula explanation:

• Meetings!A2:C11: This will be your validation. Select the entire first three columns in the “Meetings!” Table, which are Event (A), Date (B) and Customer (C).
• Meetings!C:C=”Client1”: This part only pulls information related to “Client1” (hypothetical name).

4º) If you want to filter by specifying a owner, you can add another condition to the formula:

= FILTER(Meetings!A2:C11;(Meetings!C:C=”Client1”)*(Meetings!E2:E11=”Owner1”)

This part refers to the “Owner” column (E) in the “Meetings” table

5º) To create a dynamic table that shows the current month’s meetings, follow the step below.

Create a column in the “Meetings” table, name it “Month” and enter the following formula: “=Month(Date Cell)” and drag it to apply it to the entire column.

6º) In the “Filter” table, create two new columns, enter the formula “=today()” and “=month (today’s date)” respectively.

Now, update the formula:

=FILTER(Meetings!A2:C11;(Meetings!E2:E11=”Owner1”)*(Meetings!D2:D11=0)*(Meetings!F2:F11=Filter!G1))

Formula explanation:

• Meetings!E2:E11: It refers to the “Owner” column in the “Meetings” table. It’s necessary to choose (=) the employee who will be filtered.
• Meetings!D2:D11=0: It refers to the “Done” column in the “Meetings” table, and “0” defines meetings that didn’t happen.
• Meetings!F2:F11=Filter!G1: It obtains data from the “Month” column on the “Meetings” table and checks which cells match the current month (G1) in the “Filter” table.

NOTE: Be aware that when rearranging columns  Excel may not change the columns automatically and the formula could break.