So you’re ready to start preparing for your wedding? Congratulations! Planning a wedding is a major unknown task, with so many things to consider. We help to answer your initial questions about how to plan a wedding, and in what order, with our wedding planning checklist. It’s in Excel spreadsheet format and we’ve made it free for you to download.
Download our free wedding planning checklist!
How to plan a wedding using our wedding planning checklist
- Add items that are missing for you in the left column and delete lines that aren’t applicable to your wedding.
- This checklist contains many tasks – all optional. The items within “What to complete” are merely a guide of things to consider. They certainly aren’t mandatory, nor a complete list, for any wedding.
- With so many tasks on this checklist, pace yourself and be mindful about what is really important to you. Keep in mind that it’s simple to get married. – above all, you just need your partner, an officiant, witnesses and the legal paperwork. Everything else is optional!
Categorise your wedding planning checklist
- Categorise your items by urgency and importance
- When you type “High”, “Medium” or “Low”, the cell will immediately fill with the corresponding colour,. This provides a useful visual guide of what needs to be focused on first. So if your item is High importance but Low urgency then you do not need to spend time working on it until you have organised the items that are both high urgency and high importance.
- As you progress through your list, update the status to “Not started”, “In progress” or “Complete”. As a result, the cell will automatically change colour according to which status it is.
- Add a due date to your items, even if they are interim due dates. This way you can keep track of things to organise, or payments to make
Sort your wedding planning checklist
Use the arrows in the bottom right corner of each cell to sort or filter your checklist. For example, say you want to sort your list so that every item that is high urgency is at the top of the list, press the arrow on “Urgency” and select “Sort by Colour” and select the bright green colour (the “High” colour). If you only want to see the high urgency items, choose “Filter by Colour” rather than “Sort”.
If you’d like to learn more Excel techniques for your wedding planning, you can post a comment to us or see the free standard Microsoft training here.
Tips for writing text in Excel
To add a new line within a cell, press “alt+enter” for windows users and “command+enter” for mac users.
To avoid an error when using a hyphen (-) at the start of text writing in a cell, begin text in a new cell with an apostrophe first (‘) then enter your hyphen. Click into the “What to complete” cells for an example.
More help for how to plan a wedding
Visit our weddings page for all our wedding planning checklists and resources to help you answer that “how to plan a wedding” challenge!
Comments
Please share with us! Let us know any questions you have about planning a wedding or if you have any suggestions or changes you’d like made to the checklist. We update it periodically and can include any changes to help future brides and grooms.
