Monthly Meal Planner

Family time is important, but it is hard to juggle work, school, meal time, a multitude of other responsibilities and still find time to spend with your family. The Monthly Meal Planner can help you free up precious time for family activities.

Downloading the monthly meal planner from Microsoft, which is available at no charge on this page, has everything you need to organize your meal time. It opens into an easy-to-use Excel template.

How to Use the Monthly Meal Planner

• First, click on the third page “recipes” and list each recipe as a main or side dish. In the next column, type in the name of the recipe and how many people it serves. The last column includes a space to paste the link to the recipe.
• Second, click on the second page “ingredients”. When you click on the first cell in the first column, you will see a pull down list of the recipes from the third page. Click on the recipe and list one of the ingredients; continue doing this down the page until you have listed all of the ingredients for each recipe.
• Third, click on the first page “meal plan” and fill in the date. Then go to the third and fourth columns, there you will find the pull down list for the main and side dishes. Choose the dishes you want for each day of the month.
• Finally, click on the last page. You will see a button on the right side titled “compile list.” When you click this it will generate a shopping list from your meal plan. All you have to do now is print it, and take it with you to the store.

Tips for Using the Monthly Meal Planner

• The best thing about the monthly meal planner is that it has a nearly unlimited space for recipes.
• If you enter a recipe and ingredients every time you find one you like, then soon all you will need to do is click on the first page every month and choose your meals. After that you compile your shopping list and you are all but done for the month – no, the planner won’t cook the meals for you, but it’s pretty close.

The monthly meal planner will make planning your meals quick and easy. This, in turn, will give you more quality time to spend with your family.

Download: Monthly Meal Planner