Use Google Spreadsheets to schedule meetings

Update (2007/07/13): Added a link to use template in new spreadsheet.

In my last year at San Jose State University I have on multiple occasions needed to schedule meetings with multiple peers, both for class related and extra-curricular activities. Having gotten fed up with trying to schedule and reschedule meetings and not ready to deploy the ripoki system, I used Google Docs and Spreadsheets to create a solution.

You can use this as a template for a new speadsheet if you want: Meeting Schedule Template. You’ll need a Google Account (Gmail or not) to do this. Thanks to Jonathan Rochelle in the comments for the reminder tip.

Each row represents an hour of the day and each column represents a member of the group. Each member colors in their colum as to when they’re free or busy, and I can then look across and find a time when it’s all green to schedule a meeting. If someone changes their schedule I can simply go back and refind another time when everyone’s available.

While developing the idea, I first tried going horizontally, before transposing the schedule to a vertical implementation. The problem with going horizontally was primarilly a user experiance one – it’s easier to scroll vertically than horizontally in most web browsers. In addition, I found it easier to create new rows than to create new columns at the time.

This is just one of the many useful solutions I’ve implented with Google Spreadsheets. Other uses included a group to-do list, where members checked off cells to indicate they completed tasks.

I’ve yet to explore the Google Spreadsheets API, but I’ve heard there are additional things that can be done there.