Casual Friday: Use Excel to track party prep tasks

If you've been using Excel for more than a little while, you've probably created task lists in it. You simply stretch a column as wide as you need to describe your To Do items and then type them in. This makes Excel a very flexible tool for planning, say, a holiday party - and the best part is that you can re-use the steps when you host another one.

You could start with a detailed plan of what to get and where to get it from:

If there are a lot of preparation steps, I also recommend a schedule list:

Finally, make a task list broken out by who's responsible for carrying it out. As you complete tasks, open the list and use the strikethrough command to mark them complete:

You also can sort the tasks by person and then paste them into an e-mail message.

Prepare for a party to remember!

Suzanne