Project Management with Gantt Chart (Table of Contents)
Excel Project Management Template
Every project needs to be tracked for a smooth flow of the process. If you surf on Google you will find plenty of ready templates but not necessarily which fits your needs. Most people download and start using those ready templates and not worried about how they actually prepared. Getting to know how they have prepared will be key to prepare your own project management templates using a Gantt chart. In this article, we will show you how to create a project management template using Gantt chart in excel.
How to Create Project Management Using Gantt Chart in Excel?
Excel is a popular tool for using Project Management. Let us see how we can use this with the help of an excel spreadsheet.
Project Management Gantt Chart Example
Gantt chart is the most often used technique for project management. Gantt chart is prepared by using excel’s built-in charts but in this article, we will show you the way of building a Gantt chart by using conditional formatting. Assume you are have taken a project of construction of a building, you are supposed to work in a tight guideline, from the starting day of the project and you are required to finish the project in 30 days. First thing you need to do is to list activities involved in construction. Below are the activities involved in general. Now you need to decide on the time frame of each activity i.e. duration time for each process. Prepare the duration form starting date to ending date.
- Now on the horizontal row enter these days like below. Starting date will be 17th July 2019 and the end date will be 16th Aug 2019.
- One of the problems with this is dates are too long to see in the single view, what you have to do is to change the date format from “DD-MMM-YYYY” to only “DD” format and minimize the column width.
- Now in these small boxes, we need to decide on which date each activity is supposed to close. Enter the below formula to declare the closing date.
- After using the formula output is shown below.
- This formula says if the horizontal date is >= starting date and horizontal date is <= ending date then result should be “P” or else blank.
- For applying the formula to all the remaining cells first we have to select and press Ctrl + D and then press Ctrl + R.
Now we need to apply Conditional Formatting for this. Follow the below steps to apply conditional formatting.
Step 1: Select the area that we have applied the formula to declare “P”.
Step 2: Go to Conditional Formatting and click on “New Rule”.
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Step 3: In New Rule window select the option “Format only cells that contain”.
Step 4: Next in the formula section choose “equal to” and enter the below formula.
Now we need to apply the Conditional Formatting to the cell which has the letter “P”. So enter the formula as “P”.
Step 5: Now click on “Format”.
Step 6: Now we will see the “Format Cells” window. In this window, we can choose the kind of format that we are looking to apply to the cells which has the letter “P”. Go to the “Fill” tab and choose the color as “Green”.
Step 7: In the same window go to the “Font” tab and choose the font color as “Green” only. The reason why I have selected green is because we don’t want to see the letter “P” in the Gantt chart.
Step 8: Now click on Ok to apply the formatting. It will take you back to the previous window of conditional formatting. In this window too click on “OK” to complete the conditional formatting.
Step 9: Now our Gantt chart which tracks our project of construction is ready.
Things to Remember About Project Management with Gantt Chart
- Creating Project Management with Gantt Chart is a quite complex process. It is not always easy for intermediate users of excel.
- Through conditional formatting, we can easily create a Gantt chart to track any project.
- We have given the example of construction, based on your requirement you need to change the activity list, starting date, ending date and same needs to be updated horizontally as well.
- You can change the color of the chart while applying the conditional formatting.
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