Ever feel like you’ve spent your entire week in meetings? Who hasn’t had that feeling at least a few times in their career? It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive or an individual contributor, if you don’t stay on top of your schedule, it can get a life of its own. You’ll quickly lose control over how many events and meetings you’re in from week to week and month to month. It’s crucial to manage your time wisely—and calendar analytics are one of the best ways to do that. 

What Calendar Analytics Can Tell You

While this could be most critical for executives and sales teams, everyone in your organization can benefit from calendar analytics, learning where you focus your time, who you want to focus your time with, and then using that data to best prioritize your time. This can help teams answer questions like “How much time am I spending talking to clients,” “How often do I attend internal meetings,” and even, “Will I meet my objectives and key results this year?”

As with many analytics projects, Microsoft Excel proves itself to be an excellent vehicle for calendar analytics as well. Analyzing calendar data in Excel is done primarily through the use of Pivot Tables to aggregate and visualize the information that’s stored in your calendar. Timelines and filtering by date range will let you easily find trends, busy periods, and even meeting frequency by grouping your data based on dates, attendees, event types, and other relevant fields from your calendar data. 

Getting Started

Ready to run your own calendar analytics in Excel? Here’s how you do it.

Get Your Calendar Data into Excel
First, you’ve got to populate a spreadsheet with your calendar data. Export the data from Outlook or Google Calendar into Excel. Make sure your data includes columns for date, time, event/meeting title, and attendees, plus any additional information you want to be able to report or filter on. 

Build a Pivot Table
Select the date range you want to look at, then under the Insert tab on Excel, select Pivot Table. Next, drag the relevant fields into the Pivot Table area. Some of these might include adding Date into a row while dragging Event Type to columns and Attendee to values. 

Pivot table features can help you with:

• Timelines: This lets you filter by specific date ranges
• Slicers: Filter your data even further by selecting specific criteria such as attendees or event type
• Calculations: Creating custom calculations in your Pivot Table will let you analyze data like total time spent in meetings per week and average meeting duration

Running Calendar Analytics in Excel
Finally, it’s time to glean insights from the data you’ve organized. 

• Find Your Busy Times: Uncover scheduling patterns and peak activity periods
• Meeting Duration: See the average meeting length and identify the longest and shortest meetings on your schedule
• Time Conflicts: Find out where meetings tend to overlap most on the same day
• Event Types: Take a look at the frequency of the various types of events, such as internal meetings versus client calls and personal appointments 
• Event Management: Dig into attendance rates, recurring meeting frequencies, and even plan resource allocation based on the data
• Team Coordination: Look at team availability patterns, meeting distribution across departments, and cross-team collaboration via shared events

Boost Your Calendar Analytics in Excel

If the first step of calendar analytics is getting the data into Excel, we can help with that. CloudExtend specializes in both email and Excel integrations with NetSuite and other top data sources, which means our apps make it easier to pull the calendar data you need to analyze. 

If all you need to do is pull your NetSuite calendar event data into Excel, our ExtendInsights app is purpose-built to automatically pull data from NetSuite into Excel for analysis. Refresh on a schedule—say, for monthly or quarterly calendar analytics—or on demand with a single click to get the most up-to-date data from NetSuite into Excel. It’s that simple.

Need extra help getting events and meetings from your email calendar to your NetSuite calendar? We can help with that, too. Our ExtendSync email integration syncs meetings and events bi-directionally between Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar and NetSuite. Any meeting you add to your Outlook or Google calendar will automatically populate in NetSuite, and vice versa. Automatically sync calendar events with ExtendSync, then automatically export into Excel for calendar analytics with ExtendInsights. It couldn’t be any easier. 

See how your time stacked up in 2024 so you can make sure that in 2025, you run your schedule and not the other way around. Try CloudExtend apps with your calendar analytics—start free, no credit card required.