7 key advantages to creating your gantt chart in excel
7 key advantages to creating your gantt chart in excel
After several years in selling sophisticated planning tools, we found that most clients ended up moving their plans back to excel for management and analysis. So we pose the question why not start and finish project planning in Excel?
Excel Gantt Chart Advantage 1 Reduced Learning Curve
Many users are familiar with the basic operations of Microsoft Excel. By using an excel based Gantt Chart, knowledge of how to create formula's, format cells, and insert columns or rows can be instantly applied. This hard won knowledge means that an average excel user could save over 1 week in learning time compared to using a proprietary planning tool. We suggest that you look for a professional excel gantt chart template that is simple to use. Your learning curve could be reduced from over 1 week down to half an hour.
Excel Gantt Chart Advantage 2 Improved Control
With excel, you can calculate things the way that you want to, easily. Proprietary planning tools such as MS Project have pre-programmed ways of running calculations that can be complex and time consuming to change. By using excel you can determine how you would like to calculate variables. If you are using a professional excel gantt chart template, these will be established for you, but leave you the option to simply change these to your preferred calculation approaches.
Excel Gantt Chart Advantage 3 More Flexibility
This is where MS Excel has some very substantial advantages in preparing gantt charts. The major, and over-riding advantage is flexibility. With excel you can decide what you want to calculate and how you want to calculate it. If you want to convert 368 minutes into one day, then you can do this quite simply. If you want to view resources, or not view them you can either hide or delete the resource column.
Due to the flexibility of excel many project managers start their planning in excel, attempt to transfer their plan out in to project or some other planning tool. Then when they are trying to manage the project, they bring the data back into excel again for manipulation.
Excel Gantt Chart Advantage 4 Viewing and Printing
Gantt charts are by their very nature large when printed. This usually means it is difficult to view all relevant information on the screen, and complex tiling of the gantt chart when printed. Planning tools such as MS Project can be very frustrating to view and print. They simply do not give you the flexibility to view and print exactly as you might like easily. Excel has built in scaling which enables you to view and print your gantt chart exactly as you would like.
Excel Gantt Chart Advantage 5 Integration with other MS Office Tools
Ever tried to embed a project plan into either a word document or powerpoint presentation? If you have you would be well aware of the difficulty and frustration associated with doing this. The built in Object Linking and Embedding functionality common to MS Office products is common to excel. Professional Excel based gantt chart templates are far simpler to integrate with other Office tools for presentation and documentation.
Excel Gantt Chart Advantage 6 Customise the screen the way you want, simply
With Excel, adding columns or rows is very straightforward, and many users already have this knowledge. Hide rows and columns to present only the relevant information to your audience. If you don't like the colours, font etc, just simply change them to reflect your preferred design.
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