free printable downloadable meal planner template

Free printable downloadable meal planner template how to#

The purpose of a meal plan is to make the dinner decision time less agonizing and to help you with your grocery shopping. If you don't feel like making Hamburgers, switch them with another night. If you order pizza, move the planned meal to the first week of the next month. Save it on your desktop or print it out and put it on the fridge or the inside of a cupboard.

Put your menu plan where you will see it.

I am constantly printing or tearing out pages of new recipes, but if I don't put them on my meal plan, I never make them.

Add recipes that you want to try to your planner.

You can serve Lemon Chicken twice, but the second time, serve it with potatoes instead of rice pilaf. Or Meatballs can be used for Sweet and Sour and then later in the week for Hoagies. For example, BBQ chicken on Wednesday can become BBQ chicken pizza on Friday. You can vary the sides or the appearance, but left-overs save time and money. I like this method, because then I can incorporate seasonal foods and my menus for July are distinctly different from the ones for December. Then, you can bring it out a year later and have something to work from. Or, at the end of the month or week, file the planner away until the next year. You can make three months worth of planners and then rotate them throughout the year.

Your meal plan can be reused from month to month or week to week.

The planner gives you a starter list that you can add to or amend to fit your needs. This will give you a start on your list of meals and you can add to it when you find new things.

Make a list of everything you like to cook or everything you have eaten in the last month.

Free printable downloadable meal planner template how to#

My wife has graciously provided the following tips meal planning tips, including ideas for how to use the meal and menu planners. Click on the little filter arrow and uncheck the '-' option to temporarily hide the unneeded rows. Go to Data > Filter to add a filter on this column. Here's how: First, select the Qty column, beginning with the label 'Qty' and ending with the last line of the list. Printing a Grocery List: When using the 'Menu Planner with Grocery List' template, instead of printing all 3+ pages in the List worksheet, if you want to print a grocery list containing only the items you need, use the Filter feature. Doing so will mess up the formula used to create the dynamic named range which populates the drop-down lists. You can delete and remove rows, sort, and do pretty much whatever you want as long as you don't delete cell A1.

I designed the lists to be as easy to edit. Right-click on the Planner tab and select 'Move or Copy' and select the 'Create a Copy' checkbox. That will let you store multiple weekly or monthly meal plans within the same file. The items in the list like are used to make it easy to see the different categories as you are scrolling through the list.Įxcept for the version with the grocery list, you can make copies of the worksheet.