How to fill in the agenda
- Type the title, date and time, the place or the video link, the facilitator and the attendees. Leave a field empty and it prints as a line to fill in by hand.
- Add the agenda items, one per line. After a vertical bar, add the planned time and the person who leads the item, like "Budget review | 15 min | Jonas".
- Check the planned time under the table. If it is longer than the meeting, cut an item or shorten a time now, not in the room.
- Download the Word file to send the agenda around, or the PDF to print a copy for everyone at the table.
The agenda table lists the number, the item, the owner and the time. Below it come the parts you fill in during the meeting: decisions on writing lines, an action items table with owner and due date, and a line for the next meeting. Minutes on the same sheet as the agenda are easy to find again.
Writing items people can prepare for
An item that reads "Budget" tells nobody what will happen. Write what the group should do with it: "Decide the budget for the next quarter" or "Collect questions about the new expense form". A verb at the start, such as decide, review, collect, agree or inform, tells people whether to come with an opinion, with numbers or just with their ears.
Put the items that need a decision early, while everyone is still fresh, and the updates that only inform at the end. If one item needs reading beforehand, say so in the item itself: "Decide on the vendor (read the comparison sheet first)". Keep the list short. Six to eight items with real times fit a one-hour meeting; more usually means two meetings.
Setting times and owners
Give every item a time, even a rough one, and let the template add them up. The sum should be a little under the length of the meeting, because starting, switching between items and the last question always take minutes that no item owns. Five minutes of slack in a one-hour meeting is realistic.
The owner is the person who leads that item, not the person who talks the most about it. They introduce it, keep it to its time and make sure it ends with a decision or a next step. Spreading the owners across the group also spreads the preparation. In the Word file the time and owner are plain cells, so the owner can change them when the plan shifts.
Taking minutes on the same sheet
Minutes do not need to record who said what. Three things matter afterwards: what was decided, who does what by when, and when the group meets again. The template gives each of these its own place. Write decisions as complete sentences in the Decisions box, one per line, so a decision reads the same way to someone who was not in the room.
In the action items table, write the task, one owner and a date. An action with two owners tends to have none, and an action without a date tends to stay open. Right after the meeting, send the sheet to everyone, in the Word file or as a photo of the printed page, and start the next agenda with a quick run through the open actions.
Word file or PDF
The Word file is for an agenda that goes out by email or lives in a shared folder: type over the cells, add rows with the table tools of your word processor, and keep one copy per meeting named by date. The PDF is for a printed copy, with writing lines in the Decisions box and tall rows in both tables. A long agenda continues on a second page with its headings repeated.
Tools for planning the meeting
The meeting planner shows the hours of several cities side by side, so a call with people in other time zones lands inside everyone's working day; type the resulting local time into the date field of the agenda. The time zone converter does the same for one time and one other place when you only need to tell a single colleague when to join.
The meeting cost calculator multiplies the length of the meeting by the number of people and their hourly rates, which is a useful number to look at before adding a ninth item. During the meeting, the online timer counts down the minutes of the current item on a screen everyone can see. For a longer session with several groups, the printable seating chart places people at tables, and the sign-up sheet collects names for the tasks that come out of the action items.
Frequently asked questions
Is the meeting agenda template free?
Yes. Download the Word file or the PDF as often as you like, for every meeting. There is no signup and no watermark. The PDF has one small line at the bottom of each page that names our website; the Word file has none.
Should I download the Word file or the PDF?
Take the Word file when you send the agenda around or type the minutes during the meeting: every cell is editable, rows grow with the text, and you can add or delete rows. Take the PDF when you print copies for the table or write the minutes by hand. Both have the same parts in the same order, and the items you type above appear in both.
How do I set a time and an owner for an item?
Type one item per line and add the time and the owner after a vertical bar, like "Budget review | 15 min | Jonas". A plain number counts as minutes, "1 h" as an hour, and the order of the two parts does not matter. Leave either part out when you do not need it. The planned times are added up under the table.
What if the agenda is longer than one page?
The table continues on a second page with the same column headings and a short header, and the minutes part follows it. Each page carries its page number. With no items typed, the agenda has 8 numbered blank rows and fits on one page together with the minutes.
Will the Word file open in other word processors?
It is a standard .docx file made of plain paragraphs and tables with fixed column widths, so word processors that open Word files can open it. Some quick preview windows, which only show a file without editing it, draw empty tables narrower than they are. Open the file in a full word processor to see the real layout and to type.
Why are some characters missing from my text in the PDF?
The PDF uses a standard font that covers English and most Western European letters, but no emoji and no other scripts such as Greek, Cyrillic or Chinese. Those characters are left out of the PDF, a few rare accented letters lose the accent, and a note under the fields tells you when that happens. The Word file keeps every character as you typed it.