Okay so you’re ready to make THE spreadsheet?!

Start by opening up Google Sheets, Excel, or another spreadsheet platform. I use Google Sheets so some of the things may be slightly different on other platforms.

Next you’re going to want to set up the outline of the spreadsheet. In the first row, enter the column titles Date, Place/Activity, Time, Cost, Paid, and Website. You are also going to want to freeze that row so it travels with you when you scroll. To do this, right click the 1 to highlight the entire first row. Choose “View more row actions” at the bottom, and select “Freeze up to row 1”. A thick gray line should then appear under the first row.

After that, set up the outline of your trip. I usually do this over to the side in columns I-K. In column I, I just put numbers 1 through however many days the trip is. In this example, the trip was 11 days so it’s numbered 1-11. In column J I put the day of the week and the date. I find it helpful to include the day of the week instead of just the date because on vacations it is easy to lose track of the day of the week. In column K put the city you will be in that day. I include what days are travel days by connecting the two cities with a dash. In this example on Sunday, June 2nd I’m traveling from Rome to Florence so it would say “Rome – Florence”.

Next you want to list the dates and destinations down column A. This is a great reference when you are putting together your itinerary. This is where the day of the week will come in helpful as some places are closed on certain days of the week and you want to make sure you don’t plan it for a day it is closed.

After that is set up, you then want to list your itinerary for the day. At this point you should be filling out the Place/Activity, Cost, and Website (if applicable) columns. I like to use the website columns to attach menus for restaurants, links to tours we will be going on, and general information about places or things that we will be doing that we don’t know much about.
Tip: I put food in bold face so I remember that it is food!

Then you will figure out how long it takes to get from each place to the next place. I do this the tedious way by Google Mapping each place to the next place and over and over until I get through the whole day. I also put the method of transportation whether that is walking, bus, uber, etc. It is extremely helpful to me when I am on the trip to be like oh yeah, I wanted to take the bus to this next place so I don’t have to walk for an hour.

There you go, that is how you set up THE spreadsheet. Setting it up is fairly simple, but planning the trip is another animal. Check out How to Plan a Trip for details on how to go about planning your trip!