How To Create Template In Excel 2003

This weekâ€™s post is written by Amy Miller. Amy is a writer for Office.com.

For many of us, our kids are now back in school, and the reality of packed lunches, homework assignments, and hectic schedules are a new reality. If youâ€™re a teacher, your life just got extra busy too. Juggling your own life, along with that of your children, can be a daunting task. And keeping a classroom of kids (or, shudder, teenagers) running smoothly is time consuming. Luckily, Excel is here to Help!

Many people donâ€™t realize the wealth of Excel templates that are available for free on Office.com. Yes, you read that rightâ€¦.FREE! Accessing and downloading them is simple, and you can either fill them out as is, or modify them to fit your own needs. Hereâ€™s a great video that walks you through the process step-by-step.

Now that the school year has started again, I thought Iâ€™d point out the back-to-school templates you might find especially useful. To sift through the free downloads yourself:

1. In Excel, click the File tab, and then click New.

2. In the Search Office.com for templates box, type your query, for example â€œschoolâ€, and then press ENTER to start your search.

3. To see a preview, c lick the image of the template youâ€™re interested in (it will appear on the right side of the screen), and if you like what you see, click Download.

4. Start filling out that form!

Youâ€™ll notice that a lot of the available templates are for Excel 2003 and Excel 2007, but you can still open and use them in Excel 2010. Note that many of these templates are added by community members, so we expect more 2010 templates to be uploaded as more people make the jump to the new version. Speaking of which, if youâ€™ve created a great school template in Excel, why not share it with others by submitting it to Office.com?

And to help save you even more time, here are a few templates you might find extra useful:

Â· Weekly family calendar (My new favorite! Keep track of where everyone needs to be at any given time during the week)

Â· Homework schedule (A great way for busy students to track their homework assignments)

Â· Weekly class schedule (Parents, help your new junior high and high school students juggle their busy class schedules)

Â· Electronic gradebook template (elementary school) (A detailed template for teachers to track student grades)

Â· Weekly class attendance record (Keep track of how many days this week Little Timmy made it to school)

Â· Education credits tracker (Teachers, track your continuing education credits here)

Using these templates instead of creating your own version might just save you some of that precious time that suddenly seems so elusive.

Finally, if in your copious amounts of spare time youâ€™ve daydreamed about school-related Excel templates you wish you had, shout â€˜em out in a comment below. The Office.com Templates team is always looking for good ideas and Iâ€™d be happy to pass yours along.