Excel = Best Wedding Planning Tool

Yes, I believe excel is one of the best wedding planning tools.  It's dorky but I use it every day at work and if you know me I love to use excel to stay organize.   I soon found out that it was also handy for the first two wedding planning tasks we completed: 1. setting a budget and 2. drafting a guest list. 

So first things first, we set a budget using a handy-dandy budget template.  I have to be honest it was quite overwhelming all the things you have to think about when setting a wedding budget and then seeing how much money everything adds up to! From the wedding reception to flowers to invitations, weddings are not cheap.  With the budget set, Dan and I both agreed we want to have a budget savvy wedding that our guest will enjoy rather than spending a TON of money.  This means it will take probably take more of our time researching and price comparing but we're up for the challenge.

After we set our budget, we started task #2 drafting a guest list.  I took my wedding book's advice and had my parents draft a list, Dan's parents draft one, and then Dan and I would draft ours.  Since we both have pretty big families our guest list grew pretty quickly (it’s around 350 now).  We'll look at the list and finalize it over the next few months but it was nice to get this task out of the way.

Next task on the list: picking a ceremony and reception venue which I'll save for another post. :)

On another note, tomorrow is my fiancé’s birthday!  Hopefully all this snow that is supposed to come tonight doesn't so we can go to dinner tomorrow night.  More importantly I hope that my little birthday surprise on Friday works out.  Sorry I can't give away any details since he might actually read this before then. ;) I'll share after Friday.