I'm very pleased to present my first of several planned Excel templates and tools - a suite of tools to help optimize and streamline study planning. It was developed with actuarial studying in mind, but can be adapted to many other applications as well.
I've been frustrated in the past with feeling like my studying was being held back by being too unstructured - while I could find resources for estimating importance of topics, I found it difficult to translate that to study time. In addition, I prefer to track my studies by what I've accomplished instead of by number of hours. And thirdly, I wanted an easy way to transfer all the effort spent listing out what to study and how much into an easy-to-use calendar format.
Thus began a multiple-sitting journey of finding and modifying tools to do each of these tasks - but they didn't synch together the way I really wanted. So I finally sat down and started from scratch, taking the best elements of each of my found tools and integrating them into something that was lightweight, easy to follow, and specifically intended to be printed and used physically instead of digitally.
My tool is inspired by a very common and popular time tracking spreadsheet that I've seen at multiple companies and weekly calendar templates from Vertex42, with lots of flavor of my own thrown in. (If you haven't visited Vertex42 and love spreadsheets, that place is a goldmine. I love all the clever ways they've used formulas instead of macros to make powerful and flexible spreadsheets for a variety of uses.)
It is in .xlsx format but it should be backwards-compatible for Excel 2003.
I hope you find it useful!