Download Excel free tracking and planning templates along with presentation-ready versions. Learn how to use Excel for visual project management.
If you prefer Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to manage your projects, you’re not the only one. Even if Excel was not designed as a specialized PM tool, and despite the myriad of specialized project management tools out there, Excel still has what it takes to be the project planning go-to solution for many project managers.
What makes Microsoft Excel a popular project management tool? Not only is it familiar and accessible, but it’s a convenient way to get the job done when you work with simple projects – no headaches, no high costs.
On this page, you will find info on how to use Excel spreadsheets as project management tools for data tracking, reporting and visualization. You’ll learn how to make Gantt charts, timelines, project planners and trackers in Excel and use them to manage your projects, and you will get a head start with free presentation-ready templates.
What role does the visual component play in project management?
In project management, communication and collaboration can make the difference between project approval and disapproval or between the success and failure of a project. From the perspective of communication and collaboration, visual project management is one of the most efficient project management styles.
Why? Because it integrates data-related project management activities and tools, such as data analysis, reporting, and collaboration tools with visual thinking methods and data visualization tools.
Besides managing, analyzing, reporting and tracking large volumes of project-related data, project managers are expected to communicate their work to teams and stakeholders in an effective, concise, clear and quick way.
Visualization of large amounts of complex data and processes transforms them into simple, actionable items. Lengthy, text-based project communication reports are in the past.
The visual approach allows project managers to provide real-time concise views of the project’s status, project trackers, issue management, risk management and reporting tools. The goal is to provide the best possible informed environment for a successful decision-making process.
Office Timeline helps you quickly turn complex project data into clear PowerPoint graphics that are easy to follow, but hard to forget.
Good project management tools typically offer robust project management features, such as task tracking, deadline management, and progress monitoring. Visual project management tools enable users to visually analyze data. The best visual project management tools typically combine customizable visualizations with an intuitive interface, real-time collaboration and scalability - the tool should be able to accommodate growing teams and projects. Also, to improve efficiency, project managers usually need to integrate their project management tools with other tools and systems that they use regularly.
While not visualization software, Excel is one of the most popular project management tools for professionals who manage small to midsize projects. Why? It is accessible, versatile, and cost-effective.
But can project managers use Excel as a visual project management tool? That is, can Excel analyze significant amounts of project data and provide visual means for collaboration and data communication?
The power features of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are data computation, organization, analysis and storage. Pair these with project data charting and graphing tools, which are included in Excel, and you have a fully functional project management tool.
The only caveat is that Excel has limited capacity and functionality and might not work that well when the project is complex, or the project manager deals with multiple projects at once.
Let’s see how Project managers can use Excel as a visual project management tool.
The main inbuilt tools in Excel for data visualization are charts. Depending on the data you work with and the aspects you need to highlight, there are a number of built-in chart types that you can use to visualize project data in Excel and that you can access directly by going to the Charts section under Insert on the Excel ribbon.
There are other, more complex charts that you can use in Excel to illustrate multiple aspects of project data sets at once. Some of these are:
Being more complex than the basic built-in Excel charts, these visuals require some extra work to build, but are more versatile and work better for project planning and tracking.
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