Today, I share the steps required to build an overall holiday calendar timeline in Excel. This allows you to see the entire year’s holidays with different categories (e.g. company holidays, federal, personal vacation, etc.) at a glance without requiring you to navigate month by month to see the events. All the year’s key events can be easily displayed in a single chart and to scale…meaning, you can immediately get a sense of time distances between the events in a single view. Read on to see how I built this without any calendar control or specialized scheduling app.
To reiterate the objective: I want to create a single scaled chart showing all of the above days in a timeline format providing an overview of the year’s holidays at a glance.
The days need to be categorized as: Company holidays, Federal holidays, Vacation, and Cultural holidays.
The categories will be color-coded, and to avoid overlapping labels, each category will be shown at a specific height (y-axis).
In this example, I categorize the holidays into 3 categories:
Company holidays (these are paid holidays by my company regardless of PTO balance), Federal holidays (these are observed by federal entities; private sector companies may or not may observe them), and
Vacations (these are personal vacations; e.g. these are the days I’m taking off outside of usual holidays).
Here are the dates for the events I want to plot:
Company holidays for 2025 that I want to record (in month/day/year format):
I also want to record the following federal holidays in addition to the above company holidays:
And I have the following days as personal vacation outside of holidays:
Finally, I also want to show the cultural celebration days, although they may not be official holidays:
The key is to shape the data properly in a table that Excel can decipher and render in a chart. A table with all days of the year are listed in a Date column (e.g. 1/1/2025 through 12/31/2025 for the year 2025). Then I will add Occasion column next to it for the names of the events. I will also add columns for different vacation categories: Company Holidays, Fed Holidays, Vacation, Cultural.
Each event I want to show in the chart will have a name in Occasion column and a numeric value in the same row under the desired category column. Because I want the events in a category to share the same color, and each category will need to have a unique color, these categories will be added a individual data series to the chart. For readability, I want the labels for the events per category to appear at a consistent height (along the y-axis) in the plot. This is why I will assign a unique numeric value to each category. They can be anything that’s sensible for the visibility…I chose 0.8 for the shortest column heights, and 1.2 for the tallest. I also assigned negative numbers to personal vacation days and cultural events. That way, the timeline will look less cluttered even with many events, because events with positive values will appear above the x-axis, categories with negative values will appear below the x-axis.
The reshaped table will look like this (partial days shown below, the rest of the rows continue until 12/31/2025):
Next, I will apply this data to a Clustered Column chart. The initial chart should like the one below (partial days are shown as a sample: from 1/1 through 2/2 but the final chart will include the whole year):
Not very pretty or easy to read yet, so this will require some cleanup and customizations. Namely, I will need to clean up the x-axis, y-axis, customize the labels, remove the grids, adjust the line colors as desired per category color, line widths and styles for each dataseries.
For Vacation days, I want to show the labels a little differently. So, I will add a new column ‘Custom Label’ to the table and enter a formula to bring in the date, add a Line Break (CHAR(10)), and the name of the occasion: =CONCAT(TEXT(A79,”m/d”),CHAR(10),B79) and bring the formula down for all the rows. Then I will select the Vacation dataseries on the chart and in the Formatting pane, I will select to [x] Value from cells option and select the ‘Custom Label’ column range.
After those steps, the final chart should look like the one below.
This is much better. I can immediately see the distance between events throughout the year, I can see different types of events easily recognized by category colors and legend…all in a single view! The best part is, if I want to adjust any dates or labels, I simply update the underlying table without having to touch the chart again. I can also add a new category and give it another unique number for the events just in the table and voila!…the chart is updated dynamically. The chart can be printed, shared online using Excel and OneDrive, or embedded on a web page if you so choose.
As you can imagine, this calendar timeline view can be used for any length of time, and is not limited to a year — it can be multi-year plan, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. using the same approach. It can be used for personal uses or to provide a overview of a large project at work.
In summary, while Excel does not offer a built-in dynamic timeline chart, we can create one with some creativity using its existing features. You may have seen other timeline and Gantt charts creations in Excel or Microsoft Project, however, there are some key differences from this method: Most of the Gantt charts use entire sheets (basically, cells with conditional formatting) and not within a chart. You’ll have to open Excel and the workbook to see view it, and it will typically will require a full screen layout for something that covers a year. If you want to share the view, the entire sheet or workbook needs to be shared.
Microsoft Project requires a separate purchase as it’s not part of the standard Office suite. The learning curve on Project is somewhat steep for most users, but more crucially, it’s good for timeline showing durations but not suitable for showing short events/days only. Creating a timeline in PowerPoint while easier than in Project, takes more time and is less dynamic than in Excel. Using my method presented here, you’re only dealing with a simple table in one place (Excel) and the output is in a chart that’s dynamically updated with simple table entries with many sharing options.
I hope this was educational and interesting. Thanks for reading!
