This is the second installment of project management using excel series.
Preparing & tracking a project plan using Gantt Charts
Part 2: Team To Do Lists – Project Tracking Tools
Project Status Reporting – Create a Timeline to display milestones
Time sheets and Resource management
Issue Trackers & Risk Management
Project Status Reporting – Dashboard
Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project Progress
Why Team To Do Lists as a Project Tracking Tool?
Projects are nothing but a group of people getting together and achieving an objective – like building system or constructing a bridge. While it is important to have a overall project plan and vision, it is equally important to understand how various day to day project activities are going on. This is where to do lists can help you a lot.
How to create a team to-do list to track project progress using Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel has a very good way to share a workbook with a team of people. We can use this feature to create a team to-do list. Here is a step by step tutorial to create a team todo list:
- First we will create a to-do list in excel in the following format:
Note, depending on the type of project and the kind of activities involved, your team to do list can look differently.
- In order to facilitate tracking, we have the following features:
- A column where the team member can specify his / her name. This should be done when the activity is done. A simple alternative could be to automatically load user’s name based on windows login ID. For more on this, see this article on DDoE.
- Another column where we generate a time stamp when the user enters the name. Please read this article to generate time stamps in excel
- The formula for time stamp is like this:
=IF(AND(D6<>"Not Done",D6<>""),IF(E6="",NOW(),E6),""). As you can guess, it is a circular formula. So we should enable iterative calculations from calculations options in Excel. Learn more about circular references here. - Using above 2 columns, we can track and measure how team members are working various activities and who has done what.
- When we are done, the todo list for project tracking looks like this:
- Once the list is created, first we should save it a network location where the list can be accessed by everyone.
- If your team is spread across the globe and cannot access one network, try the following options,
- Use Excel 365, it supports shared spreadsheets
- Sharepoint, If you have a sharepoint site that can be accessed by everyone, post the file there
- Use google docs spreadsheets. Google docs spreadsheets is a free alternative to MS Excel with several collaboration and team features. It is very intuitive and simple to use.
- You can create multiple copies of the to do list and share it with your team members and consolidate all the spreadsheets on frequent basis. This is a painful process as any format changes can create problems to your consolidation process.
- Once you place the file on network, we should enable sharing of the workbook. See the below screenshots to understand how to share a workbook.
- Now go get some work done.
- When you finish the task, just open the shared workbook and mark the task as done by entering your name. Excel will automatically fill in the time stamp when you marked the activity as done.
Download the To Do List Template and Use it to track your projects
Go ahead and download the excel team to-do list template and use it as a project tracking tool.
Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel
Next Steps
You can use VBA macros to automatically remove the finished to do items. I have written an article on simple to do list app using excel sometime back. Check it out to get some ideas.
In the next installment, learn how to prepare a project time line that can display various key project milestones. If you haven’t already, read the previous part of the project management using excel series – Project Planning using Gantt Charts.
Resources for Project Managers
Check out my Project Management using Excel page for more resources and helpful information on project management.
Your thoughts and suggestions?
I am not a project management expert. In fact, I know very little about project management, that is why I started this series, so that I can share the little I have picked up in the last few years and learn more from you. Please tell me your feed back using comments. I would love to hear from you.
12 Responses to “29 Excel Formula Tips for all Occasions [and proof that PHD readers truly rock]”
Some great contributions here.
Gotta love the Friday 13th formula 😀
Great tips from you all! Thanks a lot for sharing! bsamson, particularly you helped me on a terribly annoying task. 🙂
(BTW, Chandoo, it's not exactly "Find if a range is normally distributed" what my suggestion does. It checks if two proportions are statistically different. I probably gave you a bad explanation on twitter, but it'd be probably better if you fix it here... 🙂 )
Great compilation Chandoo
For the "Clean your text before you lookup"
=VLOOKUP(CLEAN(TRIM(E20)),F5:G18,2,0)
I would like to share a method to convert a number-stored-as-text before you lookup:
=VLOOKUP(E20+0,F5:G18,2,0)
@Peder, yeah, I loved that formula
@Aires: Sorry, I misunderstood your formula. Corrected the heading now.
@John.. that is a cool tip.
Hey Chandoo,
That p-value formula is really great for a statistics person like me.
What a p-value essentially is, is the probability that the results obtained from a statistical test aren't valid. So for example, if my p value is .05, there's a 5% probability that my results are wrong.
You can play with this if you install the Data Analysis Toolpak (which will perform some statistical tests for you AND provide the P Value.)
Let's say for example I've got two weeks of data (separated into columns) with the number of hours worked per day. I want to find out if the total number of hours I worked in week two were really all the different than week one.
Week1 Week2
10 11
12 9
9 10
7 8
5 8
Go to Data > Data Analysis > T-Test Assuming Unequal Variances > OK
In the Variable 1 Box, select the range of data for week 1.
In the Variable 2 Box, select the range of data for week 2.
Check "Labels"
In the Alpha box, select a value (in percentage terms) for how tolerant you are of error.
.05 is the general standard; that is to say I am willing to accept a 95% level of confidence that my result is accuarate.
Select a range output.
Excel calculates a number of results: Average (mean) for each week's data, etc.
You'll notice however that there are two P Values; one-tail and two-tail. (one tail tests are for > or .05), the number of hours I worked in week two is statistically equivalent to the number of hours I worked in week one.
So here’s a way you might want to use this. You put up a new entry on your blog. You think it’s the best entry ever! So you pull your webstats for this week and compare it to last week. You gather data for each week on the length of time a visitor spends on your website. The question you’re trying to prove statistically is whether there’s an average increase in the amount of time spent on your website this week as compared to last week (as a result of your fancy new blog post). You can run the same statistical test I illustrated above to find out. Incidentally, it matters very little to the stat test whether the quantity of visitors differs or not.
Anyhow, the Data Analysis toolpack doesn't perform a lot of stat tests that folks like me would like to have access to. In those cases I have to either use different software, or write some very complicated mathematical formulas. Having this p-value formula makes my life a LOT easier!
Thanks!
Eric~
Fantastic stuf..One line explanation is cool.
Thanks to all the contributors
OS
Take FirstName, MI, LastName in access (you can fix it to work in excel) capitalize first letter of each and lowercase the rest and add ". " if MI exists then same for last name:
Full Name: Format(Left([FirstName],1),">") & Format(Right([FirstName]),Len([FirstName])-1),"") & ". ","") & Format(Left([LastName],1),">") & Format(Right([LastName],Len([LastName])-1),"<")
I teach excel, access, etc etc for a living and i have my access students build this formula one step at a time from the inside out to show how formulas can be made even if it looks complicated. Yes I know I could just do IsNull([MI]) and reverse the order in the Iif() function but the point here is to nest as many functions as possible one by one (also I illustrate how it will fail without the Not() as it is)
Extract the month from a date
The easiest formula for this is =MONTH(a1)
It will return a 1 for January, 2 for February etc.
if in a column we write the value of total person for eg. 10 if we spent 1.33 paise each person then how we get total amount in next column and the result will in round form plzzzzz solve my problem sir................... thank u
@Anjali
If the value 10 is in B2 and 1.33 paise is in C2 the formula in D2 could be =B2*C2
If the values are a column of values you can copy the formula down by copy/paste or drag the small black handle at the bottom right corner of cell D2
kindly share with me new forumulas.
How to convert a figure like 870.70 into 870 but 871.70 into 880 using excel formula ? Please help.