Updated August 2026

Weekly work schedule template, without the spreadsheet

A weekly schedule template is usually a spreadsheet you re-derive every week: retype the shifts, re-add the hours, re-check that Thursday has enough people. You can skip the retyping by filling the week in the browser instead, then exporting CSV or printing it. If your roster genuinely never changes, though, a working spreadsheet template is fine and you should keep it.

Vendor disclosure: we make SteadyWeek, the planner described here. It is free with no account, and its limits are listed below rather than buried.

What a weekly schedule template has to hold

Strip it back and every rota template, on paper or in Excel, is the same four things.

• People down one axis, the seven days across the other.
• Shift times in the cells, with more than one shift per person per day when the day splits.
• Time off, marked clearly enough that you do not schedule over it.
• Totals: hours per person, and enough people on each day.

The first three are easy in a spreadsheet. The fourth is where the evening goes, because totals in a spreadsheet either need formulas that break when you insert a row, or they get counted by hand.

Filling it in the browser instead

Open the planner and you get a blank week, or one of three starting points (blank, café and restaurant, factory and workshop) if you would rather adjust than build. Then:

• Add your people. Free-text roles, no fixed job titles.
• Define each shift time once, for example "Open 07:00-15:00" or "Close 15:00-23:00", and paint it across the days and people who work it. Split shifts stack in the same cell.
• Drag an assignment to move it. Undo if a drop replaced something you wanted.
• Leave a cell empty to mean not working. Vacation and sick leave sit in the same grid as quiet exceptions.
• Set a minimum number of people per day; a thin day warns you instead of waiting to be noticed.

Weekly hours total per person as you assign, so the check you would have done at the end is already done. Then export the CSV, which opens in Excel, Google Sheets, or Numbers, or print the week straight from the browser for the wall.

When the spreadsheet is still the right answer

Three cases, and they are common enough to say up front.

Your roster is genuinely fixed. If the same eight people work the same days every week, you are not really scheduling, you are reprinting. A template that already works costs nothing to keep. Copy last week makes that case fast here too, but it is a week at a time and there is no recurring month.

You rotate patterns. Two-week rotations with guaranteed days off are real scheduling logic, and nothing here automates them. Shift times are reusable; the rotation is not.

Other people need to change it. A shared spreadsheet lets two managers edit at once and keeps a history. We can send a link, and you can let the team edit through it, but there are no accounts, so there is no record of who changed what.

The honest limits

The schedule saves to the local storage of the browser you used, and nowhere else until you share it. An unshared week will not appear on another laptop and disappears if you clear site data, so export the CSV when a week matters. Sharing puts a copy on our server so the links open, and one button deletes it again. There is no login either way, which also means a link is the only thing standing between the rota and whoever receives it.

There is also no staff app, no availability collection, no shift swaps, no messaging, no notifications, no time clock, and no payroll. If you want those, see our comparison of When I Work alternatives, which prices five tools that do.