This is the third installment of project management using excel series.
Preparing & tracking a project plan using Gantt Charts
Team To Do Lists – Project Tracking Tools
Part 3: 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 Create Project Timeline Chart?
There are 2 key elements in all the successful projects I have been part of.
- They had exceptional individuals who are also exceptional team players
- The communication and collaboration is really good.
While there is little that project management software can do when it comes to first point, the second point can be addressed by using right tools and visualizations. In this installment and the part 5 and 6 of this series, we will learn some excel based visualizations / charts that can help you to communicate about the project status and progress to your team and stake holders.
Project milestones can be shown in a simple time line chart in excel. While the chart doesn’t look complicated, it can provide good amount of information on project progress in a simple and understandable chart.
We will learn to create a project milestone chart like this:
Steps to create a project milestone chart in excel
- In order to create a project milestone chart, we need to have the milestone data. The simplest format for milestone data is Date and the milestone. But since our chart requires the milestone to be displayed at a certain height on the chart, we will add the third column – height.
PS: the height column can be easily calculated using formulas. I leave it to your imagination. - Once you have the data in the above format, we will add 2 more helper columns – named DUMMY and Milestone. The Dummy column is used to create the timeline (where Y axis value is zero). The milestone column is a more cleaned up version of milestones (see how it is showing #NA where the milestone is blank.)
- Now, select the date and dummy columns and insert a line chart.
- To this chart, we will add one more data series – Height column.
- Now select the height data series and change the chart type to a bar chart. Also set the height series to be plotted on secondary axis. Learn more about combining 2 chart types and adding secondary axis in excel.
- We will also set the horizontal / axis labels for the height series as the “milestones”. We need to do this so that when we set the data labels for the height series, we will see the milestone instead of month.
- At this point our chart should look like this:
- Now, we will add data labels to the height series. Set the label type as “category”
- We will also add error bars to the height series (the bar chart). We will configure the error bar in such a way that they are shown 100% on the negative side only.
- After doing this, the chart should look like this:
- Finally we will do some formatting like,
- Removing fill color / line from height series by setting them to None / transparent.
- Changing the error bar color to a dull shade of gray.
- Adding chart title and aligning it.
- Removing vertical axes and gridlines.
- Formatting horizontal axis – changing label orientation, removing tick marks.
After all this is done, our project milestone time line chart should look like this:
- That is all, we now have a cool looking project milestone chart ready. Now go and achieve a milestone.
Download the Project Milestones Time Line chart template:
I am sure you are overwhelmed reading the above tutorial. You are probably thinking if it is easier to work towards the project milestones than creating this chart. Well, don’t worry. You can download the time line chart template and play with it to suit your needs.
Download 24 Project Management Templates for Excel
What next?
Project timelines are a great way to tell the story of project to strangers and new people joining your project. They are a good addition to project status meetings and reports.
In the next installment of this series, we will learn how to use Excel to manage timesheets and resources.
If you are new, please read the first 2 parts of this series: Project planning using gantt charts, Tracking day to day project progress with team todo lists.
Your thoughts and suggestions?
What are your ideas on communicating project progress to stakeholders and new comers? What do you think about this tutorial? Please share through comments.
21 Responses to “Distinct count in Excel pivot tables”
The distinct count option works well but I have found that if I have a date field and want to group by year, month, etc. that option seems to be disabled. I need to do both, distinct count and group by year/month.
Example data; sales orders with item quantities with dates.
Challenge; sum the item quantities, count the distinct orders and group by month. How do I do this?
Perhaps that's not possible due to the grouping?
@Al... When you use data model based pivots, you cannot group values manually anymore. Why not use Excel 2016's default date grouping option? In this case we have just a few dates, so Excel is not grouping them, but if you have an year's worth of data, when you make the pivot with date in the row label area, Excel automatically groups them. If you have fewer dates or want to use your own grouping, just create a table with all dates, add columns with month, week, year etc. Then connect this table (these types of tables are usually called as calendar tables) to your data on date field as a relationship. Now you can create reports by month, quarter etc easily.
Is this the only way to do it in 2013? I find it rather cumbersome to have to create another data table listing dates with the another column for MONTH() and YEAR() to be able to summarise data for senior level...
I know people find adding calendar tables cumbersome, but it is a best practice and let's you add more layers of analysis quite easily. For example, adding analysis by weekday vs. weekend or by financial quarter or YTD calculations (you would need either Power Pivot DAX or some very carefully setup pivot table value field settings)
I had absolutely no idea this was possible. Very useful, nice work!
Doesn't work for 2010 version though (or at least not my works version)
Hi ,
The post has the following in it :
These instructions work only in Excel 2016, Office 365 and Excel 2013.
when i have 2 different Pivot tables, one without the enabled “Add this data to data model” option, and the other one with it enabled.. is there anyway i can link slicers between them?
if the answer is NO,, what to do ?
Quick note, the “Add this data to data model” option is not available for the Mac version.
perhaps outside scope of this article but I have found when I attempt to create a pivot table from an external data source (connection to a sql view) the "Add this data to data model" becomes greyed out. Anybody experienced and found a solution so I can start getting distinct count in my pivot tables?
Is there a way to still add a calculated field when using distinct count?
I found I can't change the date source after tick the " add this data to the data model", can you help to adv how to change the date source in such case?
Is there a way to update the source once you have added to the data model? I receive a new spreadsheet weekly and would like to update the connection so my tables pull from the new source.
Hi Crhis, I like how you have hulk (superhero) as your avatar. Do you know that there is a superhero in Excel too? It's Power Query. You can use it to solve your problem in a simple click. Here an intro if you need some guidance.
Powerful Introduction to Power Query
A big Thank you. It worked.
Hi, have survey data that I need to analyze but the challenge is that my key fields are showing horizontally. I tried to transpose the fields using Power Query, but unfortunately the new fields are returning same values on a pivot table despite using distinct values
How I can a do a pivot table with discount conts in some columns and then generate shor report filter pages. pls it drives crazy
Hi. Why grand total pivot of distinct count is 13? shouldn't it be 67?
Great Answer! Saved me lots of time!
Thank you!!!
Worked awesome! Thanks!!
Hi Chandoo,
I am using pivot tables for distinct count and now I need to update them with new set of data. But when I update the source data, all the columns and formatting of Pivot table disappears and I need to build it from Scratch.
Is there a possibility that I can update the source data with new rows added and also retain my pivot tables?