Free Excel Templates

What better way to learn Excel and save time, than by finding a good template? The good thing about Excel is that there are a lot of benevolent people who enjoy sharing Excel templates. Our goal at Vertex42 is to provide professional quality templates that help you solve every day problems at home, the office, or wherever. Take some time to browse Vertex42. I think you'll like what you find.

In addition to using our free Excel templates for the specific purpose they are designed for, you can also use them to see examples of Excel techniques such as drop down lists and dynamic named ranges. In addition to the 100+ templates you'll find on Vertex42, you can learn some great techniques by checking out the other sites listed below.

Vertex42's Free Templates

We've created many different templates over the years for everything from calendars to home budgets, timesheets, loans, and gantt charts. Below are just a few of the free Excel templates on Vertex42.com that you might be interested in checking out, especially if you want to see examples of design or the use of different Excel features.

Family Budget Planner

A very clean and easy-to-use budgeting spreadsheet.

Money Management Template

A full-fledged money management spreadsheet that doesn't use any VBA whatsoever. Requires more knowledge of Excel than our other budget spreadsheets, but is still surprisingly user friendly for what it does.

Excel Invoice Template

Check out the Excel 2010 version to choose a different look and feel by just changing the theme.

Meal Planner

A great example of the use of data validation drop-down lists combined with dynamic named ranges to make those lists easily editable.

Daily Planner

An example of a nice clean layout for a daily planner page. Also uses some fancy conditional formatting and linked images to display mini monthly calendars.

School Attendance Tracking

Uses conditional formatting to highlight weekends and a checkbox to swap between names and student IDs.

Wedding Checklist

It's very easy to create printable checklists with Excel. Here is a great example.

Debt Reduction Calculator

A perfect example of spreadsheet that was designed to be simple to use even though what is going on the background is extremely complicated.

Home Mortgage Calculator

A great example of how it's possible to create very powerful tools using Excel.

Free Office Templates from Microsoft

http://office.microsoft.com/templates/

Microsoft actually provides many free Excel templates. They also include Word, PowerPoint, Publisher, and Access templates, too. They are nicely organized by category and you probably can find the templates you are looking for. It's not surprising, though, that many of the templates they list are actually provided by third party companies, such as KMT Software, Inc. (i.e. TemplateZone).

Free Example Spreadsheets at Ozgrid.com

Free Excel Spreadsheets at www.ozgrid.com

This list of free excel downloads is great if you are looking for examples to demonstrate various advanced techniques in Excel. If you are a beginner, it will probably be worth your while to get a good Excel book as well. See the article "Free Excel Training" for ideas.