Got a spare hour this weekend? These two quick Excel projects show how a few tables, formulas, drop-down lists, and formatting rules can turn a blank sheet into something genuinely useful for planning and tracking everyday life.

Plan vacations with a travel tracker

Keep your itinerary, budget, and countdown in one place

Planning a trip often means juggling booking confirmations, travel dates, accommodation details, and budgets across multiple apps and emails. A simple Excel vacation tracker pulls everything together in one place, making it easier to see how much time remains before departure, which reservations still need to be finalized, and where to find your booking information.

Step 1: Create a table (Ctrl+T or Insert > Table) with column headers for Destination, Departure, Return, Status, Board, Budget, Link, and Countdown, and format the Departure and Return columns as Date and the Budget column as Currency.

Step 2: Create drop-down lists (Data > Data Validation) for the Status column (Not Booked, Reserved, Confirmed) and Board column (SC, B&B, HB, FB, AI).

Step 3: Paste this formula in the Countdown column and press Enter:

=IF([@Departure]-TODAY()>=0, [@Departure]-TODAY(), "-")

Step 4: Apply conditional formatting rules to the Countdown column, so upcoming trips become more noticeable as departure dates get closer. For each rule:

1. Select the Countdown column, then open the Home tab.
2. Click Conditional Formatting > New Rule.
3. Click Only format cells that contain.
4. Set the following parameters and formatting:

Step 5: Finally, select the whole table (excluding the header row), and add these conditional formatting rules (via Use a formula to determine which cells to format) to highlight the whole row in green while a trip is in progress and gray once the return date has passed:

Now, populate the table with your upcoming (and past) holidays. As soon as you start typing on a new row, the table will grow, and the formulas and rules will automatically expand downward.

Unlike dedicated travel-planning apps, an Excel workbook can be customized to suit any type of trip. As your travel plans grow, Excel’s filtering and sorting tools make it easy to focus on upcoming trips, compare budgets, or quickly retrieve booking information without searching through emails. If you want to take your planning further, you can use a ready-made vacation planner template that helps you manage your travel, accommodation, and activities.

OS

Windows, macOS, iPhone, iPad, Android

Free trial

1 month

Microsoft 365 includes access to Office apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint on up to five devices, 1 TB of OneDrive storage, and more.

Build a home inventory

Keep on top of household possessions​

Most people know roughly what they own, but few maintain a complete, structured record of household possessions. A home inventory tracker in Excel gives you a single place to log valuables, which can be especially useful for insurance purposes, rummage sales, moving house, or keeping tabs on warranty expiry dates.

Step 1: On row 5, create a table (Ctrl+T or Insert > Table) with headers for Item, Category, Room, Purchase, Value, and Warranty, with the Purchase and Warranty columns formatted as Date, and the Value column formatted as Currency. Name the table T_Inventory in the Table Design tab.

Step 2: Create a separate table—with the header Categories in cell I5—containing your categories, such as Appliances, Electronics, Furniture, Sports, and a catch-all-other option, like Other. Name it T_Categories. This will act as a dynamic source for the drop-down list you’ll add in Step 3 to the Category column in your T_Inventory table.

Step 3: Create drop-down lists for the Category column of your T_Inventory table:

1. Select the Category column and open the Data tab.
2. Click the Data Validation icon in the Data Tools group.
3. Select List in the Allow field.
4. Click inside the Source field, select the data cells in your T_Categories table, and click OK.

Step 4 (optional): If you want a quick at-a-glance summary of your values, you can create a dashboard in the empty rows above your table. For example, you could sum the values of all the items in your table in cell A3 using:

=SUM(T_Inventory[Value])

You could also add a data validation drop-down list to cell B2 and use the following formula in B3 to display the total value of the category selected in that drop-down list:

=SUMIFS(T_Inventory[Value], T_Inventory[Category], $B$2)

Step 5: Apply conditional formatting rules to the Warranty column, so upcoming and outdated expirations are visually flagged:

1. Select the Warranty column, then open the Home tab.
2. Click Conditional Formatting > New Rule.
3. Click Use a formula to determine which cells to format.
4. Type the following formula and click Format to apply an orange cell fill:

=AND($F6<>"",$F6<=TODAY()+60)

Start adding your household items, and you’ll soon have a searchable record you can filter by room or category. The warranty highlighting also makes it easy to spot products that need attention. And if you included the dashboard, you can select different categories in cell B2 to see the contextual subtotal.

Keep building useful spreadsheets

These builds show how easily Excel can be turned into a practical tool with just a few basic features. If you’re still in the mood to experiment, last weekend’s beginner-friendly projects—invoice automation, job tracking, and a shopping comparison matrix—offer more ways to reinforce core spreadsheet skills in different everyday contexts.