Speaker 1: Are you looking for a daily activity tracker in Excel? Well, if that's the case, then you've come to the right place because today I'm gonna be showing you exactly how to build one. I'm gonna be sharing with you some tips and suggestions of some of the things you will want to include. And I'm also going to be sharing with you some templates that I've already created and that you can access via the first link in the description below. So if time is off the essence, then I would suggest heading to that link in the description and you can get your hands on those templates and there'll be pre-done and pre-formatted, but I will be walking you through those at the end of the video. So let's say you wanted to create one from scratch. What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna give you what I would build. Of course, formatting is something that you may want to completely change. It's gonna come down to personal preference and opinion. So you'll see here as an example, I've just kind of pulled column A across. And what I wanna do here is I'm just gonna make this column a little bit bigger as well, column B that is. And you'll see as I work through this, I'm just kind of building out the formatting. Something like this, you're gonna be looking at it every day as the name suggests. So I like to keep it kind of nice, succinct and well-formatted. So what I would do here is I would literally just give this a name. So something as simple as, I'm just gonna give it daily activity tracker for now. Of course, as I say, you can change this to anything you like. It could be for a particular project and you can do something like that. I've just changed the font size to make it kind of large. Now, what we're gonna want to do here, I'm actually gonna add one more column in and I'm gonna do this as well. Now, what we want to essentially do is to build the tracker itself. So this is a title. So imagine this as, it just gives you an overview of what's to follow. Anyone who kind of opened this up if you did want to share it. So in this column, I'm gonna give the first column name as task number. And this is just a reference point really. So when anybody kind of comes in here or if you kind of open it up and you could reference this number, it just basically enables you to just to break them down. It may even enable you to count your activities as well. So you can do something as a simple one, two, three, four, count here, that kind of thing. It's not anything more complex than that. It just gives each task its own unique code and identifier. And you may, as you kind of work through this and as you start completing tasks, you may want to ensure that you give each task its own unique number just for a reference point going forward. So we've got task number. The second column I would suggest you add is the activity name. Again, I'm gonna bold that. What I'm gonna do here actually, I'll do that in a minute actually. We'll get all the columns in first and then we'll start changing some of the formatting. So we're gonna have a status column. We're gonna have a priority column. In fact, thinking about this, we're gonna put priority first, if that makes more sense. We're then gonna have a note section. Now notes, you probably want quite a lot of free text for that, so we're gonna expand this column out and we're gonna make these a little bit bigger. They'd be too big and we're gonna do that. And we're gonna also, we're going to highlight this with some formatting. We're gonna put this in a nice light gray and I'm actually gonna make this a little bit bigger as well. And I'm going to wrap some of these. I'll wrap the task number. And what you could also do if you wanted to is you could put a bordering around it. So what I've done there is in the home ribbon, I've looked for the kind of bottom border or the border functionality, and then you could put something like all borders if you wanted to. I'm not going to, but you could do that if you wanted to. Now you could start putting in your activity name. So I don't know what you're going to do every day. It depends on the type of project you work on. It depends on what you need to do each day, but this could be something as simple as conduct client call. This could be something like, actually, that would probably be second in this example. In this example, we're going to say complete status report. And that obviously would be then used on that client call. We could then do something like report to senior stakeholders following the client call. So you get the idea. I'm just putting in some examples of activities. This will obviously depend on what you do, the projects you work on, and even your organization. One thing I would suggest doing in these columns is I would set up some conditional formatting. So I'm going to just build a little table over here. And what I'm going to do, you could do this in a separate tab if you wanted. That's what a lot of people do, but I'm just going to show you this now for simplicity. And in this little table, I'm just going to give us some options for priority and status. Actually, we'll change that too into the table because that doesn't really make much sense. If I do this, then you'll get the idea of what I'm doing here. So our priorities is going to be a low priority, a medium priority, and a high priority. And as you can imagine, you're going to want to prioritize your work. Something like the client call could be high priority and report to senior stakeholders could be low in this example. But you just want to give yourself the ability to quickly view what you need to work on first. And it even may help with sorting as well. If you wanted to sort by activities, you've got a long list of activities you could sort by priorities that have the highest you need to focus on. So we're going to have low, medium, and high. And in terms of status, the ones I would recommend are something like pending or not started. Doesn't matter. I put not started actually, but pending is often used for very much the same reasons. So we're going to have not started. We're going to have in progress. So you're working on that activity. We're going to have completed. You completed that activity. And we are going to have something like no longer required because it may be that an activity that you put at the start of the day isn't actually required by the end of it. So it's important to have an option for it. And in that case, it also keeps a log. So instead of just deleting out, you know what you put in there, it might be required at some point. So it's good to keep a kind of audit trail. So these are the options. Now, what I would do here is you can do this in two different ways. You could select the whole column and then set up the data validation, or you could just set it up on the cells. And there's pros and cons to doing both. The pros of doing it on the column is that it's a little bit quicker. The cons are that you'd have the data validation in this kind of column here, unless you took it out. And I can show you how to do that. Otherwise you could just select the cells you wanted to apply to. Pros are it's a bit neater. Cons are you have to kind of reference every cell you want. So probably the easiest thing to do is let's do it on the column and I'll show you how to remove it from the cells you don't want the data validation on. So select the column, then hit data. We're going to click data validation here. And again, and what we're saying here is we want to allow a list from the source. So make sure you click in there. And the source for priority is these three cells. So I've left clicked that cell, I've dragged down on my mouse, left clicking, and now we've got equals and it's referencing this source. If I press okay, you'll notice there's a dropdown. And in that dropdown, we have those options in that source. So what I was referring to earlier is, we don't need the dropdown in these cells here. So what we then need to do is go back to data validation on those cells only, and we want to click on here, data validation and clear all. Okay, so now it doesn't apply to these cells, we don't need it to, but it will apply to everything else underneath. So we're going to do the same thing now for status. So let's just go through it again, just so you've kind of got it. So select the column, make sure you're on the data ribbon, data validation, click data validation again, and then in the allow, we need to select list and the source this time. So click in here, you can click on this and it kind of just changes the view really, but we're selecting these. And if you press this button, it will bring this view back out, press okay. And then again, we need to remove it from these columns, these cells, I should say not columns, data validation, clear all, okay. So now we have our priority and we have our status. So let's say the status report is a high priority and it hasn't been started yet. So that's obviously shaping up nicely. Now notes, as the name suggests, it could be an area for you to add some additional notes to your daily activities. So this could be something like, needs to be completed by 9 a.m., as an example. Just an area for you to add additional context should you need it. I'm actually going to, I'm actually gonna put some outside borders on. So that's a little bit neater and you can even put some down here as well. So that's that. One of the thing I would recommend you perhaps do, and this is just a purely visual thing, is you can set up some conditional formatting just to basically make cells kind of change color depending on what's kind of entered in them. So as an example, anything with high could kind of be made red by default and you don't have to kind of go in there and do that on every time you kind of enter high into that particular cell. And the way you do that is you make sure you're on the home ribbon and then you look for conditional formatting. And then what you essentially need to do is you need to do some rules. So you need to set up the rules. So click manage rules. Now, what you do here is you need to click new rule and you have a different rule types that you can set up. So as you can see here, you can format cells based on their values. You can format only cells that contain and that's what we're gonna be using now. But you can do it on various different qualifiers if you like. But what we want is for cells that contain. Now, we want a cell that specific text. So I've changed that to a specific text containing high. So anything with high, we're going to fill in red. And you can change all of this if you don't like it. This is just an example of some of the things you can do. So if I press okay and then apply, oh, sorry, with the applies to, this should be the whole sheet. So make sure you select the whole sheet. So what I did there is click that little icon there. So sorry, I'll do that slow. I was putting on a bit quick. So applies to. So clicked in there and then select that. And that selects the whole sheet, press apply and you'll see that priority has changed. The whole cell has been filled with red because that's what we've selected. You could do it a little bit differently. So if I go back into this rule, so click on that edit rule, you can change it so that the text goes red instead. So let's put no color, font, fill, font, color. Here we go. Red. Okay. Okay. So there we go. So it's gone red. It depends what you want, depends how visual you want it to be, but you get the idea. Another thing you may want to set up is something that's kind of, as an example, format only cells that contain, so specific text containing completed. You might want something to just show you quickly when something is kind of done. And I'd put that in a kind of green. We're going to obviously apply that to the whole sheet again. Because that way, when you start completing tasks, oh, it's because I got completed in there. Needs to be finalized. See, it's sometimes too good, too accurate. I haven't just got finalized right, have I? Final, finalized. Believe that's right. So now if I select this to completed, then it goes green. So what that can do, and we're nearly finished, this is the daily activity tracker I'd recommend. Very basic, very, very simple. But what I would do is once you've completed, I would set up, so what I'm going to do here. Oh, sorry, I'm experiencing some slowness in my PC. Move or copy this. So this is the first tab. We just created this. This is your daily activity tracker. If you click move or copy and create a copy, then it's going to have this number two. So what we're going to call this is completed activities. Put this in second place. Now, what we're going to do here is we're going to wipe all these out. Actually, in this instance, we should leave that in. Take these out. Now, once it's completed, you could then remove or delete the activity from your activities tracker. The other option is you could use the strikethrough functionality. So up here, you need to look for, I always struggle to find it. It is up here somewhere. Strikethrough, it might be in the, where is it? Well, there's something called strikethrough. I'll find it for you in a minute. But essentially, what you would do is strike this through to show it's been completed and then move it into this new completed activities tab. Otherwise, you could just delete it off. It's completely up to you and how you kind of want to work with your data, really. And yeah, it's just one of those personal preferences kind of things. I'm struggling to find strikethrough. I really don't know why. It is some kind of, there we go, format cells. Maybe it's here. Fill, put a font, here we go. That's what you need to do. Select all the cells, right click. We're going to go format cells and we're going to go effects strikethrough. And you'll see, it looks like it's been ticked off. So that really is the daily activity tracker in Excel. If I could spell, we'd have a completed activity tracker as well. So that's that. As I said before, right at the start of this video, here are some sample templates that I created earlier and that are available via the link if you just want to kind of get these straight away. What I'll actually do is I'll just, you can basically, you'll be able to get all of these in the same file. Just move on to the third template. Now this one's very, very kind of just high level. It's pretty much what I've gone through there with a little bit of formatting changes. It doesn't actually have the conditional formatting set up. So you probably would want this one, but I will set that up ahead of the, being able to make it downloadable. Now this one, I did just want to show you this one because this one's a little bit more complex and advanced and it may be useful for you if you want to kind of be a little bit more granular with your activity tracking. So what we've got here, as you can see, is we've actually got it by date and we've got it by time. So you can actually map out your entire day if you really, really wanted. So let me just run you through the different elements. Again, we've just got the, we've got some bordering here, some formatting. We've got the days, so Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, through to Saturday. If you wanted to, you could change this to just be a work week. If you're kind of working for an organization, obviously Monday through to Friday, if that's your typical schedule. This, now this is very clever. So if you look here, it just says equals I3 and that's because it's relating back to this date here. So if I change the start date, let's say to tomorrow, you'll see that all the dates update. So all you need to do every time you're working with this is you change the week start date. So that's really, really handy. Now, the second thing is the scheduled start time. So this has been set up with conditional formatting based looking into this table here. So the start time, I've just literally mapped out all this different start times available from six through to 5 a.m. Again, you could change that to your specific work schedule. So it starts at 7 a.m. But you could change that, oh, sorry, it starts at 6 a.m. You could change that to say, let's say your working day starts at 9 a.m. And you'll see here, it's all updated. Really, really useful stuff. Now, all this is doing is equals G3. So it's looking into the scheduled start time. Now, these have been set up on a formula, an interval formula. And it's basically saying that when this is updated, it's going to basically add some time depending on what that's updated to, specifically an hour. So let's say this is 12, then that will go to, yeah, the one of these will go to one and et cetera. So that's really, really useful. And this is even better. We've set up a time interval so that, sorry, when I said interval, the reason why this is in the formula is because we've set it up so that the time can change depending on the time interval you want. So in this example, there's 30 minutes between the time points, but obviously you're probably working in hours. That's probably most applicable to most of you watching, but you could have 90 minutes, you could have two hours. It's ultimately up to you and how you want to track. But this is a template that will be available in the link in the description below. If you wanted to go into this kind of granular detail, I hope this particular one's useful, but for the most part, this is your kind of daily activity track I'd recommend. You can actually get rid of the grid lines, make it a little bit more visual on the eye once you're kind of done. But again, it may be something that you want. So on the view grid lines, it just kind of makes it kind of more legible. So I hope this video is useful. If it was, please do hit the like button. That tells me I should continue making videos like this and do consider liking, heading over to my channel, subscribing and watching some other videos as well. I've got plenty on Excel and building the important artifacts and templates in Excel, such as, you know, project plans and Gantt charts, but I've also got videos on project management in general and some other tools and platforms should you be considering those as well. So with all that said, I hope you have an excellent day.