DBT Diary Card Templates: PDF, Excel, and Word
Search for a DBT diary card template and you'll find a hundred versions of roughly the same grid, in every file format, most of them scanned from a handout that was itself a copy of something else. They are not interchangeable. The format you hand a client shapes whether the card comes back completed, and what you can do with it when it does.
Here's what each format is actually good for, and what any template has to contain to be worth using.
What every diary card template must include
Regardless of format, a usable card has five components. If a template you found online is missing one, it isn't a diary card — it's a mood tracker.
- Emotions, rated. A consistent 0–5 scale across a fixed set of emotions. The scale matters more than which emotions; changing it mid-treatment destroys comparability.
- Urges, rated. Separate from emotions, and rated at their peak for the day rather than where they ended.
- Target behaviors. Whether the behavior occurred — specific to this client's treatment hierarchy, not a generic list.
- Skills used. Ideally a checklist plus an overall 0–7 rating of skills use for the day.
- A daily row. Seven rows, one per day, filled the same day — not reconstructed on the way to session.
Medication adherence and sleep are common and useful additions. Anything beyond that starts costing you completion rates.
Printable PDF
The default, and still the right answer more often than clinicians expect. Print it, hand it over, done. No account, no battery, no assumptions about the client's phone.
Paper's real advantage is that it's visible. A card on the kitchen table gets filled out; an app icon on page three of a home screen does not.
Its disadvantage is that you get one week at a time, on paper, and any trend across months exists only in your memory. Our free printable DBT diary card PDF is a clean, standard-format starting point.
Use when: starting out, low-tech clients, adolescents whose phone use you don't want to increase, or any client for whom the phone itself is part of the problem.
Fillable PDF
The same grid with form fields, completed on a computer or tablet and saved. Legible, no printer required, easy to email.
The trade-off is that it's still a flat file. Each week is a separate document, nothing trends, and now you have PHI sitting in an email thread and a downloads folder — worth thinking about before you make it your standard workflow.
Use when: the client works at a computer all day and would genuinely rather type, or handwriting is a barrier.
Excel or Google Sheets
The format clinicians reach for when they want to see something across time. A spreadsheet will chart urge ratings over eight weeks, which no PDF will.
It's also the format clients abandon fastest. A spreadsheet on a phone is unpleasant to fill out, one mistyped cell breaks a formula, and version control across weeks becomes its own small project. In practice, spreadsheet cards tend to work when the therapist maintains the sheet and the client reports verbally — which defeats the point of daily self-monitoring.
Use when: you have a numerate, motivated client who already lives in spreadsheets, or you're aggregating group data for program evaluation.
Word document
Mostly useful as a source format rather than a client-facing one — it's what you edit when you want to change the emotion list or add a target behavior, then export to PDF.
Handing a client a .docx tends to produce a card with a broken table on it.
Use when: you're customizing a template, not distributing one.
When to stop using a template
Every generic template makes the same compromise: it uses a fixed list of emotions and target behaviors, because it has to serve everyone.
But the target behaviors are the part that must be client-specific. A card tracking "self-harm urge" for a client whose treatment target is binge eating is tracking the wrong thing, and the client notices — which is often the quiet reason cards stop coming back.
Once you're customizing per client, you've outgrown find-and-edit. The diary card builder lets you assemble a card with the emotions, urges, target behaviors, and skills that match a specific treatment plan, then hand it over as a PDF or assign it digitally so responses land in the client's chart rather than in your inbox.
A note on provenance
The diary card originates in Linehan's standard DBT protocol, and the University of Washington Behavioral Research and Therapy Clinics version remains the reference implementation. Many templates circulating online are lossy copies — check that whatever you adopt still separates urges from emotions and includes a skills-use rating, because those are the two things most often dropped in translation.
For a walkthrough of a completed card and the mistakes clients make filling one out, see DBT diary card examples.
References
- Linehan, M. M. (2015). DBT Skills Training Manual (2nd ed.). Guilford Press.
- Behavioral Research & Therapy Clinics, University of Washington — DBT diary card with instructions.