Scheduling Microsoft MIX08 with Excel

For a design-orientated conference, Microsoft’s MIX08 event has one of the worst-designed session timetables/planners I’ve ever come across. The sessions are listed in no apparent order and doesn’t actually provide any methods to sort the list by title, time, place or focus just in case you have any sense of control.

If you wanted to see what’s on during a particular time-slot, nope, can’t do that. If you wanted to see what’s on in a particular room on a day, nope, can’t do that. If you wanted to plan a list of sessions you’re interested in to find any conflicts, nope, can’t do that.

Because my time is so much less valuable than whomever designed this, I’ve taken the liberty to recompose the entire schedule in an Excel workbook to give some sense of time and place with what’s going on during the 3-day event with over 76 sessions in total.

First, I have an overview schedule of all the events and functions at MIX.

Then for each day, I have a detailed schedule of all the sessions that are happening that day columnized by which room it’s happening in.

Together with some nice colors, cell formatting and customized view options, if I may say so myself, I have designed a pretty damn good timetable.

What I’m going to do for myself is color highlight the sessions (cells) which I’m interested in attending so I have a clear picture of where I should be and when. Because I would feel so guilty being the only person at the event who actually has a clue what’s going on, I felt obliged to make available this Excel document for everyone else to download.

Download the schedule in Excel 2007 format (XLSX) here or the Excel 2000 format (XLS) here.

I’ll try to update the schedule when sessions time/place change. As a result of any errors in the schedule, I hold no responsibility if you end up in a LOLCat convention by mistake. But I’m sure you’ll fit right in.

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