Explore Project Management Excel Templates for effective planning and tracking with clear, data-driven visuals.
The bundle will help you track the actual status of the project. Furthermore, you can manage risks and communicate progress to your team members and project owners. What are you waiting for? Browse and download useful free project management templates.
Now, let us see the key project phases and life cycle. The main goal is to improve control and quality. So here are a few words about what part of the tasks we should list in the specific phases!
- In the initiation phase, we perform the following tasks: resource management, cost management, goal definition, risk analysis, and approval phase.
- In the second stage (development phase), the main tasks are creating WBS (work breakdown structure), setting up the budget, and cash-flow planning. Finally, at the end of this phase, we have to decide, based on the collected Data, whether to launch the project.
- If we get the green light, we can proceed with the most important phase. This is the execution phase, which is about effectively doing the work. The following key tasks must be completed: progress monitoring, testing, resolving issues, and creating templates, reports, and forecasts.
- The fourth phase is the project’s ending (deliverance); all testing is done, and we analyze the tasks done so far.
Project Management Templates
Can Excel be used for project management? Project managers can use Excel to track and manage their projects in several ways. Discover our 22 useful and free downloadable project management templates. Each template is fully compatible with Microsoft Excel.
The first target is project tracking. There are many diverse tools at our disposal to support this primary goal. For example, we have modeled a software development task in Excel and complemented it with some decision-supporting tools. This is the best way to show and share the project’s status without deeply diving into the details.
Gantt Chart Project Planner Template
The Gantt chart Excel template allows you to plan and track project activities. It uses a Gantt chart for project planning to create a quick overview. You need to add only a few pieces of data: dates and task duration.
Project Planner uses periods for intervals. For example, start = 1 is period 1, and duration = 5 means the project spans 5 periods starting from the start period. Enter data starting in B5 to update the chart.
You can manage different activities using the Gantt chart and focus on your selected stage.
Project Activity Template
The project activity template will overview the planning and scheduling phase. Switch between the ‘Project’ and ‘HR’ views! Do you have many tasks at the same time? That is no problem. You can reassign the human resources. We are using conditional formatting to create the heat map.
Project Risk Template
In this project management example, the project risk template uses an average ranking to get the final score. The relative ranking of the risks sets this priority list. Risk is any unexpected event that affects the main project. In the example, you can choose three flags for risk: high, medium, and low.
Project Timeline Template
Project control will be easy if you use a project timeline template. Create milestone events and show the activities in a given period.
Project Tracker
Manage, track, and update your project details using this project tracker template. The tracker can be useful for showing and tracking each task’s progress against the plan. However, our Gantt chart template-based tool is the best choice if you can manage sub-tasks using a single Worksheet.
Project Budget Template
The project budget template aims to compare the target values with actual ones. As usual, you can edit the template according to your needs.
Project Timesheet Template
Calculating the differences between the finish time and the start time is easy. Use the =MOD(‘finish time’-‘start time’,1)*24 formula to convert the gap into hours. Project timesheets are an essential part of the business. Track your employee’s work hours, sick days, and overtime hours, and save money. The spreadsheet (examples on this post) can help you accurately track time without boring paperwork.
Issue Tracker Template
We recommend our one-page spreadsheet if you are looking for a simple issue-tracking template. The reusable template contains the following columns: ID, issue, type, priority, and open and close dates.
Critical Path Method (CPM) Template
The critical Path Method (CPM) provides an overview for project managers to check which tasks are critical and which are late.
First, this template helps you define the required tasks and build a sorted list. After that, create a Gantt chart to show the relationships between tasks. Last but not least, find the critical and non-critical paths! As a result, resolve the predicted completion time for each task. You can find more on Vertex42.
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