Have you ever wondered why some businesses thrive while others struggle? It’s not just about impressive marketing or a loyal customer base; it’s about having a clear vision and the right tools to bring that vision to life.
That’s where Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) come in. This framework helps organizations align their teams, enhance accountability, and achieve ambitious goals.
Excel templates are popular solutions for customizing your OKRs to fit your organization’s needs. They optimize data tracking, making it easy to visualize progress and spot areas for improvement.
In this post, we’ll explore the top seven customizable OKR templates in Excel to streamline your goal-setting process. We’ll also share a few alternatives that may better suit your needs. Read on!
- What Makes a Good OKR Excel Template?
- Top 7 OKR Excel Templates to Explore
- 1. The Excel OKR Template by Weekdone
- 2. The Excel OKR Tracking Template by Mooncamp
- 3. The Excel Weighted OKR Template by Coefficient
- 4. The Excel OKR Review Template by Coefficient
- 5. The Excel Team OKR Template by Coefficient
- 6. The Excel OKR Template by Cascade
- 7. OKR Spreadsheet Weekly Checklist by WPS Template
- Limitations of Using Excel for OKR Templates
- Alternative OKR Excel Templates
- Crush Your Ambitious OKRs with ClickUp
What Makes a Good OKR Excel Template?
Choosing the right OKR template is essential for effectively managing your objectives and ensuring alignment across your organization.
Here are some key factors to consider when selecting Excel OKR templates that meet your specific needs:
- Clarity and simplicity: Opt for a template with a clean, intuitive layout that minimizes complexity. Clear instructions and guidelines help reduce confusion, allowing team members to understand their roles and contributions toward each OKR easily
- Customizability: Select templates that let you tailor fields and layouts according to your organization’s goals and team dynamics. This flexibility enables you to adjust your objectives as your business priorities evolve, keeping your OKRs relevant and actionable
- Progress tracking: Choose templates with engaging visualizations, such as charts and graphs, to display milestones and results clearly. Real-time updates in these visual elements help teams monitor their progress, celebrate achievements, and identify areas that need attention
- Pre-built formulas: Look for templates that feature automated calculations to streamline your goal-tracking process. Pre-built formulas reduce the risk of human error and save time, allowing your team to focus on analyzing results rather than manual data entry
- External data integration: Choose templates that can seamlessly integrate with your existing business planning systems or data sources. This capability ensures your OKRs are aligned with the latest insights and metrics, empowering informed decision-making and enhancing overall analysis
Top 7 OKR Excel Templates to Explore
Each essential element of a good template plays a significant role in enhancing clarity, accountability, and progress monitoring. This is why selecting the right OKR template is crucial for aligning your team’s efforts and driving measurable results.
To simplify your choices, we’ve curated the seven best Excel OKR templates. Explore these options to find the perfect fit for your organization and elevate your goal-setting and planning process:
1. The Excel OKR Template by Weekdone
Weekdone’s Excel OKR Template is ideal for monitoring OKRs on multiple levels. The framework comes with sub-sheets on company, team, and individual OKRs. Each cell has a simple yet appealing theme, which makes it easy to read.
Its straightforward layout also makes customization easy. To track more teams, you only need to duplicate a subsheet.
Another advantage is that almost every cell is formula-driven. This means one update in key results instantly changes the overall objective fulfillment.
Why you’ll love it:
- Automatically calculate key results with embedded formulas
- Keep OKR management straightforward with its simple pre-built goal categories
- Improve team alignment with color-coded progress indicators for quick status assessments
Ideal use case:
This template is perfect for startups and small businesses. It is well-suited for managing OKRs with a special focus on long-term goals.
2. The Excel OKR Tracking Template by Mooncamp
Want an in-depth approach to OKR tracking? Mooncamp’s Excel OKR Tracking Template is an ideal pick. It features company and team sheets to track every OKR.
Plus, each key result (KR) is mapped with details on the owner, deadline, confidence level, and more. The template also has an OKR dashboard sheet that connects and visualizes overall progress.
Mooncamp even provides a guide, check-in sheet, and OKR examples to nurture discipline and understanding for new users.
Why you’ll love it:
- Visualize progress with appealing bar graphs that update in real-time
- Easily present in OKR reviews with a dedicated dashboard sheet for summaries
- Enhance accountability with clearly defined owner responsibilities and deadlines for each key result
Ideal use case:
This is an ideal template for businesses that want all their OKR dashboard elements on a single page. It is also great for regular OKR progress reviews and data-driven adjustments.
💡Pro Tip: Are you on the lookout for effective goal-setting templates?
Here are some tips to select the right one:
- Assess your needs to identify what specific goals you want to achieve
- Explore customization options that allow you to tailor the template to fit your unique processes
- Look for integration capabilities with your existing tools for seamless workflow management
- Evaluate support and resources available, such as guides and tutorials, to help you get started
3. The Excel Weighted OKR Template by Coefficient
The Excel Weighted OKR Template aligns business goals with departmental targets. It features a column to specify the weight of each key result to communicate how your team impacts the entire organization.
The template breaks down progress into two key aspects. Overall, KR progress visualizes how far a team has come, and weighted score visualizes how much KR weightage has been achieved.
This approach helps top management and teams focus on key areas that need attention. Coefficient also includes a distinct color palette and clear due dates to ensure all stakeholders stay on track.
Why you’ll love it:
- Prioritize and analyze OKRs efficiently with weighted scoring
- Ensure real-time updates with pre-built formulas for each cell
- Structure your OKRs with subtables and summaries for each objective
Ideal use case:
The template is designed for teams and small businesses who want to prioritize high-impact objectives.
4. The Excel OKR Review Template by Coefficient
Coefficient’s Excel OKR Review Template is a popular solution for conducting reviews effectively. It’s designed for leadership or escalation meetings to ensure OKRs are achieved.
The template includes a table that maps the latest status of each OKR—complete with the time frame in which it’s to be achieved. It also has a comment section to communicate concerns or key updates.
Aside from the review table, the framework closes with a summary that highlights the positives and action plans. Overall, it is perfect for facilitating a clear and actionable OKR review meeting.
Why you’ll love it:
- Conduct simple yet in-depth OKR reviews with room for recording for details and summaries
- Deliver clear status updates with each key result mapped against the respective objective
- Promote collaborative feedback with designated areas for team input and suggested next steps
Ideal use case:
This is a great template for HR and leadership teams. It is best when focusing on quarterly performance reviews and feedback loops.
5. The Excel Team OKR Template by Coefficient
The Excel Team OKR Template by Coefficient is an OKR goal-setting template designed for small, focused teams. It identifies each OKR, the team responsible for it, and the timeframe in which to achieve it. The template’s team-first representation of OKRs fosters ownership and accountability within the specific function.
With pre-built formulas, the template also lets you automatically track progress against targets in real time. This streamlined approach promotes efficiency and transparency in achieving team and company objectives together.
Why you’ll love it:
- Encourage responsibility and ownership with team-focused OKRs
- Quickly visualize key results with assigned timeframes for each objective
- Boost collaboration through clear assignments, ensuring everyone knows their roles and contributions toward team goals
Ideal use case:
This template is perfect for small, cross-functional teams working on collaborative projects. It ensures unified goals and accountability across different functions, making it easier to align efforts and achieve shared objectives.
6. The Excel OKR Template by Cascade
This multi-sheet framework by Cascade provides separate sections for company, team, and individual OKRs. It also allows you to track progress and highlight issues at each level.
This Excel OKR Template is great for enhancing transparency and accountability, with clear visualizations and automated calculations. Its glossary and starting guide ensure everyone is equally equipped to contribute to strategic goals.
Why you’ll love it:
- Align team and company OKRs with a one-page goal tracker
- Track progress instantly with a pre-built progress field that updates in real time
- Customize goals based on department or team focus
Ideal use case:
This template is ideal for organizations that aim to achieve team alignment. It ensures that everyone is working together toward common goals.
7. OKR Spreadsheet Weekly Checklist by WPS Template
WPS’s OKR Spreadsheet Weekly Checklist is designed to help businesses with evolving deliverables. The framework features dedicated subsheets on objectives, key results, weekly targets, and actual achievements. This ensures a structured approach to tracking and managing weekly progress on OKRs.
It also provides a clear overview of OKR progress and a separate space for adding specific updates. Plus, the framework features a confidence level table for each OKR. This helps management understand the likelihood of success and the areas that need priority support.
Why you’ll love it:
- Plan weekly OKR check-ins with simple, checklist-style tracking
- Adjust efforts and priorities with the task confidence level field
- Escalate issues effortlessly with dedicated comment sections
Ideal use case:
This template is perfect for team leaders and businesses dealing with dynamic targets. It’s also great for monitoring weekly OKR progress and focusing on time-sensitive OKRs.
➡️Read More: A Comprehensive Guide to Product OKRs
Limitations of Using Excel for OKR Templates
While Excel is a powerful tool for data analysis and a popular alternative to Google Sheets, it has notable drawbacks when used for OKR goal-setting.
Here are some key limitations to consider:
- Collaboration: Excel lacks real-time collaboration features, making it difficult for teams to work together on OKRs. Manual sharing and version control can lead to confusion and conflicts
- Task management: It does not offer built-in task management capabilities, hindering the connection between OKRs and the specific tasks needed to realize them. This limitation affects progress tracking and accountability
- Reminders and alerts: Without reminders or alerts for deadlines and progress updates, there’s an increased risk of missed deadlines and delays in achieving goals
- Complex integrations: Excel has limited integration options with non-Microsoft tools, requiring separate data transfers that can lead to inconsistencies and decreased efficiency
- Visualization: The visualizations in Excel are less compelling than those offered by dedicated goal management tools, lacking built-in analytics for tracking OKR progress effectively
Alternative OKR Excel Templates
Excel’s limitations make it quite incompatible with goal-setting strategies. That’s why having an alternative is crucial. Before trying spreadsheet tools like Google Sheets, it’s best to consider a project management approach.
That’s where ClickUp comes in. As an all-in-one productivity platform, it offers robust task management, automation, and seamless integrations, making it ideal for managing OKRs effectively.
With ClickUp, you can create dedicated OKR dashboards, set reminders, and collaborate in real time, ensuring your team stays aligned and accountable. Its customizable templates further allow you to tailor the goal-setting process to your organization’s unique needs, offering advantages far beyond Excel.
Here’s a concise comparison to highlight how they differ:
Feature | Excel | ClickUp |
---|---|---|
OKR templates library | ✅ Comes with basic templates | ✅ 🏆 More variety & pre-built productivity frameworks |
Template customization | ➖ Requires manual setup | ✅ 🏆 Flexible and instant adjustments |
Visualizations | ➖ Basic charts. It’s tedious to create and manage. Has no built-in analytics | ✅🏆🏆 Comes with a variety of visualizations, from progress charts to capacity planning matrices. Also has built-in dashboards you can customize for deeper analytical insights |
Progress tracking | ➖ Basic and manual progress tracking. Complex to set up. | ✅🏆 Includes visual progress bars, automated tracking, and more granular updates |
Goal alignment | ❌ No task management or features for connecting OKRs to action plans | ✅🏆 Offers dedicated goals and task management to ensure company and individual OKRs are aligned strategically |
Collaboration | ❌ Limited sharing and difficult real-time editing | ✅🏆 Seamless live-editing and a dedicated chat tool to collaborate in real time. Also has instant commenting and tagging in any template and document |
Cost | Paid, either a one-time license fee or subscription plans | ✅🏆🏆 Free and paid plans are available to fit your needs |
Integrations and automation | ➖ Basic but mostly within the Microsoft ecosystem. No automations. | ✅🏆🏆 1000+ integrations and 30+ built-in tools. Offers advanced automation, including generating summaries, reports, task status updates, and more |
ClickUp has already transformed project management for businesses around the globe.
Overall, it’s built to achieve targets and align projects with every established OKR.
Here are some ClickUp templates that surpass an Excel file:
1. The ClickUp Company OKRs and Goals Template
Need a one-page overview of all your OKRs? Look no further than the ClickUp Company OKRs and Goals Template. This is one of the most effective free OKR templates that offers 30 Custom Statuses for in-depth progress tracking. It also has 14 Custom Fields that map every essential data point related to your goals.
This goal-setting template has eight views and multiple OKR sub-folders. Each Space organizes team-level OKRs, regional targets, and departmental tasks. These views also keep insights and information specific and structured.
As a ready-to-use framework, this is ideal for all purposes, from sales OKRs to cross-functional projects.
Why you’ll love it:
- Optimize and structure OKR tracking with objectives as tasks and key results as sub-tasks
- Differentiate departments, hardness grade, and OKR categories with clear color-coded labels
- Simplify OKR review using views based on priority, status, and department
Ideal use case:
This template is perfect for both small and large teams looking to manage diverse OKRs with detailed categorization.
2. The ClickUp SMART Goals Template
The ClickUp SMART Goals Template offers a dedicated form with questions that help create clear, actionable, measurable goals. This feature also helps users consciously understand and create a SMART goal. The details and answers are then instantly visualized in clear OKR tables.
Aside from a goal-creation form, the template offers in-depth views on objectives, key targets, and goal efforts.
Why you’ll love it:
- Easily create SMART goals with the help of built-in structured form and clear prompts
- Document, analyze, and understand the effort required to achieve each OKR through data fields like timelines, due dates, and assigned responsibilities
- Automate tasks based on their status changes and enhance efficiency in your OKR management workflows
Ideal use case:
This template is perfect if you need a structured format to create and manage your SMART goals. It’s also a great pick for businesses looking to drive OKR tracking efficiency with automation.
3. The ClickUp OKRs Template
ClickUp’s OKRs Template optimizes productivity for long- and short-term business targets. The framework records objective details, primary teams, initiatives, and detailed time frames for each OKR. It also lets you map the OKR type and connect key results as subtasks, keeping each OKR tile and dependency crisp and structured.
The template’s Custom Views effectively visualize OKR progress and update according to how you close connected tasks. ClickUp also includes instant task-creation buttons to map as many goals as possible to their respective action items.
Why you’ll love it:
- Set start and due dates with precise goal timelines
- Stay on top of OKR updates with the live completion bar field
- Access team, quarter, and initiative-specific custom views for easy analysis
Ideal use case:
This template best suits teams that focus on time tracking in their OKR efforts. It’s also great for multiple cross-functional teams who need dynamic progress updates.
4. The ClickUp OKR Framework Template
Want a simple yet effective OKR framework? The ClickUp OKR Framework Template is an excellent solution for unifying business operations.
The template includes customizable task statuses (e.g., To Do, In Progress, Complete) and fields for tracking OKR details like department and progress. Views include a Global OKR, a Getting Started Guide, a Progress Board, and a Timeline to help monitor each goal’s progress and identify blockers.
The Global OKR view presents tasks grouped by responsible teams, which is ideal for department reviews. The OKR Progress Board visualizes routine task completion according to their status.
And the Timeline view ensures that dependent tasks adhere to project roadmaps and OKR strategies.
Why you’ll love it:
- Adopt a simple setup for OKR tracking with only essential fields like department, OKR status, and progress
- Highlight team and individual responsibility to foster accountability
- Generate reports and live insights with AI and automation via ClickUp Brain that comes integrated into this template
Ideal use case:
This template is ideal for teams looking for a balance between a straightforward layout and an AI-integrated OKR process.
5. The ClickUp SMART Goal Action Plan Template
The ClickUp SMART Goal Action Plan Template is a framework that streamlines your path to business success. This template provides custom statuses, fields, and views to organize and visualize insights on goal progress.
It groups tasks based on objectives, maps due dates, and lets you highlight obstacles. It also offers a “Goal Health” view that helps users quickly assess each goal’s health. This view supports proactive planning by flagging potential issues early, making it easier for leaders to adjust strategies as needed.
Why you’ll love it:
- Keep a finger on the pulse of OKR progress with the template’s built-in goal health information
- Link goal initiative and OKR status to easily visualize the OKR roadmap and development
- Inform management of potential issues with its dedicated obstacles data field
Ideal use case:
The template suits large teams and businesses quite well. It delivers a detailed overview of goal health and facilitates timely intervention against potential risks to OKR fulfillment.
6. ClickUp’s Strategic Marketing OKR Template
Want to blend your company goals with your marketing OKR strategies? ClickUp’s Strategic Marketing OKR Template is your one-stop solution. This framework instantly maps key results, priority levels, OKR categories, and clear status fields for all your marketing campaigns.
You can also monitor communication channels, allocate and track task-specific budgets, and manage actual expenses. Multiple adaptable workflows, like automated task planning and budget tracking, support dynamic campaign needs, with integrations and views easily customized for any marketing project.
This simple OKR template is perfect for many industries and business types, including ad agencies, production companies, and B2B and B2C businesses with active clients and customers.
Why you’ll love it:
- Connect marketing channels with OKRs to map their influence on communication strategies
- Manage each OKR’s budgets and actual expenses for better financial control
- Build marketing momentum and maintain a clear OKR timeframe with the template’s timeline and progress views
Ideal use case:
The template is perfect for marketing teams. It aligns all campaign OKRs with channel performance and budget management.
💡Pro Tip: Use ClickUp Goals to set, achieve, and monitor OKRs more efficiently. They give you a clear view of your main objectives with real-time progress updates. You can link project tasks that contribute to each objective for seamless progress tracking.
Plus, you can pair them with OKR templates (that come with access to all platform features), ensuring a comprehensive and adaptable OKR management experience.
Here’s how it’ll help you:
- Streamline tracking of key results to ensure your team stays on target 📊
- Foster accountability by assigning specific responsibilities to team members Visualize progress with dynamic charts that update in real time 📈
- Link relevant tasks to your goals for cohesive project management 🔗
- Customize templates to fit your organization’s unique OKR framework ✅
Crush Your Ambitious OKRs with ClickUp
Visualize your objectives and connect them to your efforts—this is the key to making meaningful progress. Ditch the manual inefficiency of Excel and focus your time where it matters most—on pursuing those Big, Hair, Audacious Goals (BHAGs). With a ready-to-use OKR template, you can get a head start and compound momentum.
Each of ClickUp’s six objectives and key results’ templates shared above is equipped with live progress tracking, built-in reminders, collaboration, and automation—features where Excel falls painfully short.
ClickUp also offers dedicated goal management, powerful analytics, and stunning visualizations, making it the superior choice. It’s almost too powerful, but it’s exactly what your business deserves!
So why wait?
Sign up on ClickUp and elevate your OKR management processes today!