Excel is a well-known tool for companies to manage and plan their staff and resources. In fact, when it comes to creating an Excel schedule, this is one of the tasks that can quickly become complicated. To help you plan your resources with Excel software and tools, here’s our advice.
Why create a work schedule?
For companies, a schedule must comply with current legislation. Employers have a certain amount of freedom when it comes to defining the working hours of their teams and employees. However, their interests and needs must not be overlooked. To this end, he must take into consideration the provisions laid down in the articles of the Labor Code. These articles deal in particular with the number of working hours per day and night shifts.
Since it serves as the basis for calculating employee remuneration, the schedule is considered a legally binding document for your organization.
1. Select an existing Excel planning template
Excel-type software is a powerful management tool for your team, allowing you to generate numerous spreadsheets, charts, tables and other means of presentation. It can sometimes be difficult to find your way around in terms of project or team planning, given the sheer number of possibilities.
Fortunately, there are pre-existing scheduling templates to facilitate your staff scheduling tasks, offered by the software. These feature powerful functions that facilitate schedule management, sharing and collaboration. These templates integrate certain calculation ranges and data presentation formats that are highly useful for managing your schedules and planning your tasks and teams within your organization.
2. Modify the model with your company data
If you don’t have your own scheduling software or planning tool, you may be able to find sample schedules in Excel, but the functionalities are not always optimized to facilitate your management tasks. You have to enter your company information by hand. Thanks to the functionalities, all the names appearing in the templates can be modified, and additional fields can be created to suit your project and requirements. You can access the versions offered by Microsoft simply by typing the word “planning” in the search field, followed by pressing the enter key.
The spreadsheet is then opened by double-clicking on the templates that appear. When the template is opened, a spreadsheet is displayed which already contains information in the existing fields. With this functionality, as the formatting is already done within the management software, you can simply use the spreadsheet as you wish and insert the data relating to your project or company in order to draw up your schedules.
3. Customize the template to suit your needs: colors, spreadsheets…
Once the information has been integrated into the Excel spreadsheet, you can modify its appearance using the parameters, tools and functions available. For example, you can add more colors and change the way the data appears, to suit your organization and your project. With this feature, the schedule is displayed for one month. If you’d like it to be more extensive, use the arrows in the gray area next to the date.
Favoring the use of scheduling software
At first glance, software such as Excel seems simple to use when it comes to planning your team, but when you want to create complex files and have a lot of data to process, these software and tools can present certain limitations in your project planning tasks:
- Lack ofautomation: if information in your planning changes, you have to modify it manually in these programs.
- Compliance with legislation must be taken into account by the people who create this Excel document, because the software in question will not do it for you.
- When you have many people and teams working for your company, you sometimes have to multiply the number of spreadsheets. This can make it difficult to keep track of all the information and all the different pages for your teams.
One solution to this problem is to opt for project-specific scheduling software. Shyfter, the #1 planning software provider, offers you a powerful, easy-to-use planning tool that helps you automate your management. What’s more, our scheduling software helps you comply with your country’s legal requirements at all times, and centralizes all your teams’ data in a practical, intuitive, 100% online interface.
Conclusion
Excel software and tools are interesting when it comes to planning with limited amounts of information within your project. But for greater automation and ease of management, consider dedicated scheduling software to help you manage and plan your resources and team within your organization.
Through its ergonomic management tool, Shyfter offers various solutions adapted to your project, notably to help you allocate your tasks directly in your schedule management system, and offers you a mobile application version available online, facilitating planning, directly dedicated to your employees.