Every potluck that goes wrong goes wrong the same way, and it is not anybody's cooking. Ten people are asked to "bring something", each of them picks the dish that is easiest to carry, and the table ends up with four bowls of pasta salad, two cakes and nothing hot. Nobody did anything wrong. Nobody could see what anybody else was bringing.
A sign-up sheet fixes that by turning a vague request into a fixed number of lines. Lines are the whole method. Three dessert lines get three desserts; six side lines get six sides; and the dishes nobody volunteers for — the drinks, the ice, the plates — get a line of their own, which is the only way they ever arrive. The sheet here opens with those lines already drawn, and the Thanksgiving and Christmas versions go one step further and name the dish on each line, because people sign up for "mashed potatoes" much faster than for "a side".
The "Contains" column is the one that keeps everybody safe. Writing "nuts" or "dairy" next to a dish takes five seconds and saves a guest from asking at every plate, and the foot of the sheet carries the one food-safety rule that matters at a long lunch: perishable food comes off the table after two hours.
If the gathering is a Christmas dinner rather than an office lunch, the same idea runs through planning Christmas dinner, which covers asking for a dish rather than for help and giving away the food that travels. Our free printable Christmas planner puts the menu, the gift list and a six-week countdown on three sheets, and the printable Christmas grocery list covers whatever the host is still buying.
The honest limit of a sheet on a noticeboard is that it only works for the people who walk past it. For a group that never meets before the day, copy the sheet as a list into the group chat instead, and ask people to reply with the line they will take.
