How to write the fill-in lines
One meal per line, in the order day, meal, then what it is: Mon dinner: chili. The day is matched on its first three letters so Mon, Monday and Mon. all land in the same column. The colon is optional and a dash works too. Meal names are the four the grid knows about, and a line naming a meal you have switched off is reported back with the reason rather than dropped in silence.
Two lines aimed at the same cell are joined with a slash, which is how you get Yogurt / granola into one box. On a two-week sheet, prefix a line with W2 to put it in the second week; without a prefix everything goes to week one. Leave the whole box empty and the grid prints blank, which is what most people want from a fridge-door sheet.
Cell size is a consequence, not a setting
The grid is sized to fill one Letter page in landscape, so the height of each cell is whatever is left after the rows are counted. One week with three meals gives you cells around 45 mm tall, which is enough for a dish name and a couple of ingredients in handwriting. Two weeks with four meals apiece is 28 rows on the same page and the cells drop to about 12 mm, which is legible in print but tight for a pen.
| Setup | Rows | Roughly | Practical for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 week, dinner only | 1 | 46 mm | Writing a full menu by hand |
| 1 week, 3 meals | 3 | 45 mm | The common family sheet |
| 1 week, 4 meals | 4 | 35 mm | Comfortable |
| 2 weeks, 3 meals | 6 | 21 mm | Fine if you type the meals in first |
| 2 weeks, 4 meals | 8 | 15 mm | Printing two one-week sheets is easier to write on |
If you are going to write on the sheet rather than fill it in here, two separate one-week prints beat one two-week print every time.
The corner box
Ticking the corner box option leaves a small ruled space in the bottom right of every cell. It is deliberately unlabelled, because what people want to put there varies: a calorie figure, a carb count, a prep time, initials for whoever is cooking, a tick for whether the ingredients are already bought. If you are tracking something numeric across a week, having the figure in a consistent corner makes the column easy to add up by eye.
What the box is not is a nutrition tool. Nothing here calculates or checks anything you write in it, and a meal plan that has to meet a medical requirement is a plan to work out with the person who set the requirement, not with a printable grid.
Where the week starts
Monday-start suits planning that follows a shopping trip: if you shop Saturday or Sunday, a Monday-first grid puts the whole plan after the groceries arrive. Sunday-start matches most US wall calendars and is easier to line up against school and work schedules already written in that layout. Pick whichever one you will actually read correctly at a glance, since a grid you misread by one column is worse than no grid.
Making it survive contact with the week
Plans fail in the same place every time, which is Thursday. The fix is not more planning; it is leaving two cells deliberately empty and writing "leftovers" or "whatever is open" in them, so the sheet has slack built in rather than being quietly abandoned on the first night something goes wrong. Copy the text output into a notes app before you print, and next week you have last week's plan to edit rather than a blank page to fill.
Questions people ask
Why did my line not land in the grid?
Almost always one of three things. The day has to come first and be recognisable from its first three letters, so a line starting with a date or a dish name will not match. The meal has to be breakfast, lunch, dinner or snack, and it has to be one you have ticked on; a line for snack on a sheet with snack switched off is reported with that reason. And there has to be something written after the meal name. Every rejected line is listed under the preview with the reason attached, so the fastest fix is to read that list rather than to guess.
Can I put dates on it instead of weekday names?
Not directly. The columns are weekdays, which is what makes the same sheet reusable week after week rather than tied to one specific set of dates. When a particular week matters, put the range in the heading field: "Meal plan, 3/9 to 3/15" prints across the top and the weekday columns underneath still make sense. If you need actual dated cells, a calendar grid is a different tool from a meal grid.
How do I get two snacks a day?
Use one snack row and split the cell. Writing Tue snack: apple and Tue snack: crackers on separate lines gives you apple / crackers in the box, which reads fine at any cell size. You can also write it as one line with your own labels, like Tue snack: AM apple, PM crackers. The four meal rows are fixed because adding more would shrink every cell on the page for everyone.
Does anything I type get saved?
No. The grid is assembled in this browser tab and disappears on refresh; nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored. The copy-as-text box at the bottom exists for exactly this reason. Paste it into a notes app and next week you can paste it back, change three dinners and reprint, which takes about a minute and is the closest thing to saving the tool offers.