#Using excel as project planner series#
#Using excel as project planner download#

That said, there’s often a role for Excel to play. The size, time line, and details of a given project will determine what kind of tool is right for it. Other project management approaches with Excel These leaders will likely be eager to see financial performance data in easily legible graphs.

Bright Hub recommends using this crossover to present data from project management documents at stakeholder meetings, updating the higher-ups on key details. One of the bonuses to using Excel is its compatibility with other Microsoft Office products, such as Word and PowerPoint.

It’s not one of the more in-depth project management templates available, but such an outlook is indispensable. This document spans 12 months and delivers easily comprehensible views of how much money has been spent on, and earned by, an individual project. If you want to think about projects in a longer-term format and learn from macro trends, you can create a profit and loss form. A basic interactive project budget in Excel allows you to compare cost estimates to final figures with an easy side-by-side view. The Houston Chronicle’s Small Business guide gives a few examples of budget templates you can try for your next project. While budgeting is its own function, there are also plenty of ways to manage your project more precisely through an Excel form. This ensures that there are enough people to keep tasks moving along, but not too many with the same role, which could cause confusion or competition. Each member of the team is assigned one or more of the RACI roles, with responsible members performing the hands-on work, accountable employees giving approval, consulted individuals advising, and informed people getting updates.Ī RACI Matrix in Excel uses color-coded boxes to show how many people are performing each kind of duty for each phase of an ongoing project. Excel can simplify this process.īright Hub Project Management recommends a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) Matrix as a people management tool. The first stages of a plan, when every employee receives an initial assignment, are fairly straightforward, but unless managers have a way to see how those tasks are progressing, they’ll be hard-pressed to keep the operation on track. Even the smallest projects can run into assignment tracking issues. RACI matricesĭelegation is one of the trickiest parts of project management. With conditional formatting, you can customize the chart until it matches your company’s internal branding.

#Using excel as project planner download#

Premium Microsoft Office members can download an official version that delivers automatic updating on data entry and an easy-to-use scroll bar. Voila! You’ve got an eye-pleasing chart that shows phase-by-phase progress at a glance.įor team leaders without the time or inclination to build their own Gantt charts, there are plenty of downloadable options that provide helpful features. Turn that data into a stacked bar chart, then adjust the axis options to make minor units on the chart equal a single day. To build your own Gantt chart in Excel, create a spreadsheet with time line data for the project, including start and target end dates for each phase.

#Using excel as project planner series#

Gantt chartsĪ Gantt chart consists of a series of horizontal bars, each for a particular task, representing the schedule for a specific phase of a project. The following are some examples of Excel project management in action. By applying a template or following a tutorial, you can create a fully functional project management view within Excel.

Today’s project management demands go beyond such a vanilla approach, but thankfully, Excel is adaptable. What kinds of Excel templates help with project management?Įntering data into fields of a blank spreadsheet isn’t a helpful way to keep your teams on track.