Excel for Project Management
Project Management is the discipline of planning, organising and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives. Without setting and assessing measurable goals and objectives of various efforts and resources, projects don’t stand a chance of seeing a successful completion. This is where Excel for Project Management can greatly assist.
It is vital for any project to be finished on time and within the agreed budget. Late delivery of the finished project will often incur financial penalties.
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When it comes to project management you can spend a lot of money on sophisticated software specifically designed to keep you and everything on track. But you actually have powerful tools right on your desktop! Microsoft Excel can be your secret to handling all you need for managing the project especially those unique aspects of your project that are not dealt with in the formal software.
With Excel’s spreadsheets you can create project management charts and forms. You can view your installed project management templates or view online templates such as strategic project and portfolio management, functional project and portfolio management and others. There are also critical path project management templates available online. You can also view the installed business plan templates which come with your Microsoft Office software.
Many project managers have testified to finding Microsoft Excel very useful to perform various of their management tasks. Some examples are Gantt charts and project planning, project reporting and project dashboards, time sheets and trackers and charts depicting the status of the project.
Other ways that project managers have made use of Excel spreadsheets is in workload management, discussions, document collaboration, dropbox/Google docs integration, email integration, customised reports, newsfeeds and so on.
All these project management tasks are better managed with a good knowledge of Excel. Project managers will better manage time, budgets, deadlines, work tasks, teams and people.
To summarise, Excel templates for project management provides all the core requirements for planning and managing projects simply and easily. The Microsoft templates can be used on all versions of Excel for Windows as well as Excel for Mac 2011 and 2004 making it a cross platform project management solution.