However, as businesses and software evolve at lightspeed, there are more efficient alternatives at hand.Įven though MS Excel can be used for project management, we can’t say it’s a “native” platform. Use this template to track and communicate the progress of your project over one year.Ī better alternative for project managementĪ few decades ago, Excel was the standard tool for project managers. Key stakeholders and managers must know whether a project is on the right track. Welllingtone (a UK-based portfolio management consultancy) has found that status reporting is the number one activity most PMOs undertake. With this template, you can create a pretty functional and visually-appealing to-do list. This is usually because employees fail to prioritize their tasks to tackle the most important stuff first, costing them so much productive time. Most office workers are truly productive for just 3 hours a day. You can break down your projects by phase, tasks, and teammates. In fact, Capterra states that Gantt charts are the third most-desired feature for project management software.Įxcel’s Gantt chart template allows you to design one pretty quickly. Gantt charts are visually-appealing tools to showcase your project schedule. Input your project data, select all the information from the table, and use Excel to automatically create a line graph. To create a burndown chart, all you need is a three-column table with the following information: baseline budget.Įxcel doesn’t offer a burndown chart template per se, but since they’re so simple, we decided to include them in this list. You can also use a burndown chart as a sort of budget template to track things like actual budget vs. They’re useful to forecast delays before they occur and keep a closer eye on your team’s overall performance. It also includes a built-in calculator to sort your project based on conditional data.īurndown charts are concrete, two-axis graphs that illustrate whether your project is on track or delayed. You can use it to monitor the overall progress of your projects, categorize them by the assigned employee, and see task status. We’ll start with the simplest Excel template of them all: the project tracker template. One of the few good things about Excel is its free templates.īasically, you can plug and play any template from their gallery and adapt it to your needs. Five project management templates in Excel So, if for any reason you need or have a preference to use Excel, there are a few ways you can make your life easier with some templates. But, does “fine” really cut it at your business? However, you clicked on this article to learn more about Excel, not to have us expound on why it’s bad. In short, Excel is… fine for project management. You can’t automate many processes for multiple projects.You can’t collaborate in real-time with team members.Sure, you can create project status reports and Gantt charts and even track project budgets, but Excel is so manual that you’ll waste a lot of time and increase the risk of error. It can get the job done, but there’s a better way. In other words, using MS Excel for project management is like cutting a cake with a saw. If you’ve ever felt the pain of trying to run a project with an Excel workbook full of complicated formulas, conditional formatting, and macros only to watch it crash and implode, then you know it’s not pretty. But, to be honest, it’s not the ideal choice. The simplest answer is yes, you can use Excel for project management. Get started with Is Excel a project management tool? In this guide, we’ll show you if Microsoft Excel can support your project management efforts and explore a possible alternative. Given how many PMs use it, it’s a question worth asking. Being one of the oldest (and most-used) spreadsheet tools, we can’t argue that Excel hasn’t been a great platform.īut is it a great tool for effective project management?
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