Free Desk Booking Template in Excel [Plus Google Sheets]

Most desk booking spreadsheets tell you what people booked. This desk booking template in Excel also tracks who turned up, which is where the difference between a tidy sheet and a useful one sits.

It’s one file, free, and it works in both Excel and Google Sheets. Six tabs: your desks, a 2-week booking grid, a check-in log, a day-by-day floor view, and a dashboard that calculates your utilization and tells you how many desks you actually need.

We built it after looking at 12 months of our own desk data: 12,829 bookings in OfficeRnD’s office, all requiring check-in. What that year showed us is in the second half of this article, so you can hold your own numbers against a real hybrid office.

What’s in the file?

Six tabs, in the order you’ll use them.

• Start Here. Setup in 4 steps, plus a short list of the signs you’ve outgrown a spreadsheet.
• Setup. Your desks (up to 30) and your people (up to 40), entered once. Every other tab reads from here, so you add a desk in one place, and it appears everywhere.
• Bookings. A 2-week grid, Monday to Friday. Pick a name from the dropdown to book a desk. If somebody ends up booked at two desks on the same day, the cell turns red.
• Check-in. The tab that does the work. Each morning you mark Showed or No-show against yesterday’s bookings. Amber means booked but not yet checked in.
• Day View. Pick a day and see the whole floor: who’s sitting where, which desks are free, who didn’t show, and a list of everyone in that day.
• Dashboard. Utilization by day and by weekday, peak against average, no-show rate, and a desk requirement calculated from your busiest day.

The limits, stated plainly: 30 desks, 40 people, one office, 10 working days at a time. Past that, look at desk booking software instead.

How to set up your desk booking template in Excel

Twenty minutes, start to finish.

1. Make your copy

In Google Sheets, use File, then Make a copy so it saves to your own Drive. In Excel, download the file and save it to SharePoint or OneDrive if more than one person will edit it.

2. List your desks and your people

Open Setup. Type your desk names into the desk table: D1, D2, or whatever your office already calls them. Add a zone (North, Quiet, Focus) and a note about what’s on the desk. Dual monitor, standing, dock. People pick desks on those details, so it’s worth the 5 minutes.

Then add your people. Those names fill the dropdowns on the Bookings tab.

3. Set your start date and your buffer

Set “Bookings start” to a Monday. Every date across the grid updates from that one cell.

Set your peak buffer. 15% is a sensible default: it’s the spare capacity you want on your busiest day so that the last 2 people in still find a seat. This number drives the desk recommendation on the Dashboard.

4. Book desks, then record check-ins

Click any cell in the booking grid and pick a name. Blank means the desk is free.

The next morning, open Check-in and mark who showed up. This is the step people skip, and it’s the step that makes every number on the Dashboard mean something. Ten minutes a day, walked from the door to the far wall.

Who owns the file

One person, named, with a backup. Office manager, workplace coordinator or people ops. Their job is to keep the desk list current, record check-ins, and settle clashes.

In Google Sheets, give the owner Editor rights and everyone else Commenter rights if you want bookings requested rather than made directly. In Excel, use SharePoint or OneDrive and skip email attachments entirely. Version control by email is how a booking system dies in week 3.

What your dashboard is telling you

Six numbers sit across the top. Here’s what a bad one looks like.

• Average daily utilization. Booked or occupied desks against desks available, averaged across the 10 days. Under 40% and you’re paying for space nobody wants. Over 85% and people are hunting for seats.
• Peak day utilization. Your busiest day. This is the number that decides whether the office feels workable, because nobody experiences an average.
• Peak vs average. The multiple between the two. Anything above 1.5× means your week has a strong shape and you need to plan around the peak.
• No-show rate. Bookings where nobody turned up, as a share of recorded check-ins. It’s calculated on check-ins you’ve actually logged, so a half-filled log still gives an honest number. Above 10% and your busy days look busier on paper than they are.
• Desk to people ratio. How many people share each desk today.
• Desks you need. Busiest-day demand plus your buffer, rounded up. Compared against the desks you have, so it comes out as a surplus or a shortfall.

Below those, two tables do most of the thinking: utilization day by day, and utilization by weekday averaged across both weeks. The weekday table is the one to screenshot for your leadership team.

How your numbers compare to a real hybrid office

We use OfficeRnD Workplace to run our office, so we pulled a full year of data from it. 8 July 2025 to 7 July 2026. 12,829 desk bookings requiring check-in, 8,467 confirmed booking occurrences.

Here’s what to hold your dashboard against.

Tuesday runs at nearly twice Friday

Monday, Tuesday and Thursday each average 70 to 72%. Wednesday sits at 64%. Friday comes in at 37.2%, barely half of any other weekday.

An office sized for our 63% average would be under pressure every Tuesday and half empty every Friday. Roughly one working day in five goes above 80%, and our busiest days of the year hit full capacity.

This matches what the benchmarks show. CBRE’s 2026 Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights puts global average office utilization at 53% for 2025, up from 38% the year before, with peak utilization averaging 80%. The gap between the two numbers is the entire planning problem.

So when your template’s weekday table shows a 2× spread, that’s normal. Plan for the busy end of it. Our office space calculator works the same way, and there’s more detail in our guide on how much office space you need.

Three-quarters of attendance gets decided week by week

74.6% of our confirmed attendance came from one-off bookings rather than recurring ones. People decide each week whether coming in is worth it, usually because a specific colleague or meeting will be there.

This is why the booking grid needs to be easy to read and easy to change. Recurring patterns cover a quarter of the picture. The rest is people looking at who’s in on Wednesday and deciding on Tuesday night.

The Friday paradox

Friday produced the strangest finding of the year. It has the highest share of recurring bookings of any day (30%), and it’s also the least reliable day of the week.

39.2% of Friday bookings end up canceled, against 32 to 34% on other days. Friday’s no-show rate is 11%, the highest of the week, compared to 8.2% on Tuesday.

The people who book Fridays are regulars, and they’re the most likely to bail. Standing Friday reservations quietly decay into empty desks. If your check-in tab shows the same thing, you’ve found the day where your booking rules need the most teeth.

One in three booked desks gets released before it’s wasted

Of those 12,829 bookings, 66% were confirmed, 24.8% were canceled by the employee ahead of time, and 9.2% were auto-canceled because nobody checked in.

Read together: a third of booked desk-days went back into the pool before they were wasted, and nearly 1 in 10 bookings would have been a desk sitting empty all day with somebody’s name on it. In our office that’s 4 to 5 desks recovered every working day, or about 8% of daily capacity, from a single policy setting.

Without check-in, our reported utilization would be inflated by desks nobody sat at, and anyone looking for a seat on a busy Tuesday would see a floor plan full of empty “occupied” desks.

Your template can’t auto-release anything. What it can do is show you the size of the problem, so you know what a check-in rule is worth before you go looking for one.

The mandate sets the floor, the week sets the shape

Our hybrid policy asks for 8 office days a month. Against roughly 21 working days, that’s an attendance floor of about 38%.

Friday utilization is 37.2%, sitting almost exactly on the floor. Monday to Thursday averages 69%, which is 1.7 to 1.9× above it.

Everything above the floor is voluntary. People cluster on the days their colleagues are in, and they do it consistently enough that the pattern held across a full year. If you’re writing or revising a policy, our hot desking policy template and our ebook on hybrid work guidelines both cover the mechanics. There’s wider context in our hybrid work statistics roundup.

How many desks do you actually need?

The Dashboard’s right-sizing block answers this from your own data rather than a rule of thumb.

It takes your busiest day’s demand, adds your peak buffer, and rounds up. Demand uses real check-ins where you recorded them and bookings where you didn’t, so the number gets more honest the more diligent you are with the check-in tab.

Two things worth understanding about it.

1. It uses the busiest day, not the average. Sizing on an average produces an office that fails once a week.
2. It counts people who showed, not people who booked. Those are different numbers, and our year of data puts the gap at 9.2%.

Desk sharing ratios have tightened as attendance has recovered. CBRE reports that 48% of organizations now target a sharing ratio between 1.01 and 1.49 people per seat, up sharply from 21% in 2024, and 87% now set explicit utilization targets. If your template suggests something in that range, you’re in step with the market.

Treat the output as a direction. Ten working days is too short a window to sign a lease on, but it’s long enough to know whether you’re 2 desks short or 10 desks over. More ideas on the operational side in our guide to hot desk management.

Five booking rules that keep the numbers honest

Rules make the difference between a spreadsheet people trust and one they ignore.

• A 2-week booking window. Matches the template’s grid. Long enough to plan around a meeting, short enough that nobody parks a desk for a month.
• One desk per person per day. The grid flags a double booking in red, but the rule is what stops it happening.
• Cancel by 5pm the day before. Our data says employees canceled 24.8% of bookings themselves, which is where most of that recovered capacity comes from. Make cancelling easy and people will do it.
• Check in by 10am. Without a rule, the check-in tab becomes optional and every number downstream stops meaning anything.
• Clean desk at the end of the day. Shared desks stop being shared the moment somebody leaves a monitor stand and a family photo on one.

Set the rules once, write them down, and put them somewhere people see them. Policies like these also affect attendance and team productivity more than most managers expect.

Excel or Google Sheets

Same file, same formulas, and every function in it (COUNTIF, INDEX, SUMPRODUCT, MATCH) works in both. Your desk booking template in Excel behaves identically in Sheets, so choose on how your team works rather than on features.

Where the spreadsheet stops working

This template is honest about its ceiling. Ours covers 365 days and 12,829 bookings. Yours covers 10 working days and whatever somebody remembered to type in.

Signs you’ve reached the limit:

• More than 30 desks, more than one floor, or more than one office on the same file
• Somebody has to walk the floor with a laptop every morning to fill in check-ins
• Meeting rooms, parking or visitors need booking alongside the desks
• You want months of history, not a rolling two weeks
• Different teams have quietly started using different systems
• Booking clashes happen weekly
• Your desk count has to be defensible to finance rather than estimated from 10 days

The last one matters more than it sounds. A 2-week sample tells you your week has a shape. It won’t tell you what next year’s floor plan should look like.

There’s one more limit that shows up in bigger companies. When we polled our audience on social media, 11% said they ran desk booking on a spreadsheet and 17.4% had built something in-house.

Around 30% were on desk booking software. The split matters less than what sat behind it: answers from the same company often disagreed, because different teams were running different systems. If your finance team books desks in Outlook and your engineers share a sheet, you don’t have a booking system. You have three, and none of them can tell you how full the office was on Tuesday.

Hybrid working itself has settled into something worth measuring properly. The randomized trial by Bloom, Han and Liang, published in Nature in 2024, found that hybrid work cut quit rates by a third with no drop in performance. That’s a working arrangement to manage well, and managing it well means knowing who’s in the building.

If you want a shortlist, we keep an updated comparison of the best desk booking software.

What this looks like without the spreadsheet

Every tab in the template exists because software does the same job automatically. Here’s the mapping.

The 34% figure at the top of this article came from one setting: check-in required, auto-cancel on miss. That’s a checkbox in OfficeRnD Workplace’s desk booking functionality and a daily walk around the office in a spreadsheet.

Other free templates

• Hybrid work schedule template in Excel
• Meeting room booking template in Excel
• Visitor log Excel template