Excel: My Manager Wants Me to Create a New Expense Report from Scratch

This page is an advertiser-supported excerpt of the book, Power Excel 2010-2013 from MrExcel - 567 Excel Mysteries Solved. If you like this topic, please consider buying the entire e-book.


Problem: My manager wants me to design a new expense report completely from scratch. It seems intimidating to create this report from scratch.

Strategy: There are hundreds of free prebuilt documents available to registered owners of Excel, so "œstarting from scratch" isn't as frightening as it might seem. When you select File, New and then select a category from the list at the left, Excel will show you all the available documents. To use a document, you click the thumbnail and choose Download.

  1. Get free templates from the New File dialog.

    Additional Details: The variety of documents available is amazing. For instance, choose More Categories from the left, and you can access identification cards, games, fantasy football trackers, scorecards, and tournament brackets. Before you design a new form, see if Excel has such a form already available.

    Gotcha: This feature is available only to people who own legitimate copies of Excel. If you are using a pirated version, you cannot access the templates.