A day-by-day itinerary template for Google Sheets, built step by step

Start with one master sheet and a fixed set of columns. Category and Paid By work best as dropdowns, and Place should be a real name beside an address so anyone can paste it into a map without hunting through notes.

• Date: drives sorting and auto-fill, for example 2026-05-14.
• Start time and end time: orders the day, for example 09:30.
• Place: the name of the real place.
• Address: text you can paste into a map.
• Area or neighborhood: shows at a glance which stops are close together.
• Category: sleep, eat, transit or activity, as a dropdown.
• Booking reference: a confirmation number or link.
• Cost: the amount, with its currency.
• Paid by: who fronted it, as a dropdown.
• Notes: hours, deposits, anything worth remembering.

Add Status, with confirmed and maybe, so people can rank the maybes. Add Room, which answers who is staying where, and Votes, which replaces the group-chat thread where opinions go to die. Anything beyond these is probably decoration.

For most group trips, one master sheet with a single date column wins. Every row is one stop, so you can sort by time, filter by city and run one total over the whole cost column. A lookup formula also behaves better against one flat table than against six scattered tabs.

A tab per day still makes sense in two cases. A dense city day with eight or ten timed entries reads better on its own page, and some people want a clean one-pager per day to drop into the group chat. If you go that way, keep a master summary tab anyway, or you lose the ability to sort and total anything.

The honest tradeoff is that per-day tabs are nicer to read and a master sheet is nicer to run.

Put the start date in one cell, say B2, and fill the date column from it. Google documents the function as SEQUENCE(rows, columns, start, step), and only the number of rows is required, so typing =SEQUENCE(5,1,B2,1) in cell A5 returns five consecutive dates starting from B2.

Change B2 and every date shifts, which is what makes the template reusable for the next trip. To show weekday names beside the dates, wrap a date cell in TEXT, for example =TEXT(A5,"ddd").

Per Google's documentation, SUMIF(range, criterion, sum_range) adds up the cells in one range that meet a condition. If column E holds the amount and column D holds who paid, =SUMIF(D:D,"Maya",E:E) gives one person's running total, and =SUMIF(A:A,A5,E:E) gives the total for a single day against the date column.

Set these up once in the master copy and every duplicated trip inherits them. If costs are split unevenly, add a shares column and multiply, or track only the payer and the amount and settle up outside the sheet.

Select the column, open Data, then Data validation, and add a dropdown with options such as Booked, Maybe and Voted out. Google's help page on in-cell dropdowns also covers rejecting or warning about entries that are not on the list, which keeps the column clean.

The same technique works for Category and Paid By. A column that only accepts the values you chose can be filtered reliably, which is the whole point of having it.

Skip the link blast. Google Drive offers viewer, commenter and editor roles, and general access can be restricted or set to anyone with the link. Setting link access to Commenter and promoting only you and one co-organizer to Editor lets everyone else vote and flag conflicts without deleting a row at one in the morning.

Comment-only voting also leaves a paper trail. Instead of deleting a row, a commenter writes a suggestion such as swapping the day three hike for the beach, and the organizer approves or rejects it.

A small votes-and-rooms tab helps: list the maybes, let people add a tally as a comment, and assign rooms in a third column. One tab, no formulas, and nobody has to ask who is staying where.

The skeleton is the same, but the columns that save you differ. Road trips fail on logistics between stops, and city trips fail on what can be reached on foot and when things book out.

• Road trip: add Leg (start to end), Distance, Drive time and an estimated fuel cost, so each day opens with the driving rather than the sights. Check-in windows matter more than check-out.
• City trip: add Walk from previous stop, Neighborhood and a Book-by date for timed entries and dinner reservations. They show up the stop that is thirty-five minutes from everything else.

Make a clean master copy and duplicate it for each trip. In the master, delete everything trip-specific, such as dates, hotels, names and costs, but keep the headers, the formulas and one row of dummy data so you can confirm the formulas still work.

Then reset in five steps: use File and Make a copy and name it for the trip, clear the trip data but keep one dummy row per section, update the start date cell, check the dates roll forward, and set sharing from scratch, because a copy can keep old permissions. A spreadsheet remembers nothing between trips, so saved places never carry over.

Turn on offline access before the trip, not at the airport. Google's help page says it works in Chrome and Edge with the Docs Offline extension, needs enough free storage, and must be turned on while you are online.

Even then a sheet is a static document on the ground. Save a printed or PDF copy of each day, and download an offline map area for anything remote.

A spreadsheet is a planning artifact. Votes end up in the group chat while the plan sits in the sheet, so the two drift apart. Tracking expenses means typing numbers into a cell later, and the person holding it all together ends up as the only editor everyone messages.

Ollin covers that gap. Describe the trip in a sentence and it drafts the day-by-day plan, everyone invited opens it from a link in the browser, and changes show up live. The group ranks the maybes with group picks, assigns rooms, chats beside the plan, and splits expenses and settles up. It is free for up to 15 travelers on a trip.

The honest cost of switching is flexibility. You cannot redesign the columns or write custom formulas the way you can in Sheets. If the template is the system, keep the sheet. If the trip is the system, a planner earns its place.