Today is my kids’ (we have twins – boy & girl) 3rd birthday. As we celebrate the day, I want to take a moment away from all Excel stuff and share my experience being a dad. Grab a cup of coffee or whatever keeps you going, relax and read on.
The first shock
My first shock of being a dad arrived even before my kids were born. It was the first ultrasound scan Jo (my wife) went thru. The nurse announced,
I hear two heart-beats. Let me re-check
It would not be an understatement to say Jo and I skipped a few heart-beats hearing that! We never thought we would be blessed with twins. While we are doubly happy we also worried whether we can be good parents.
To top it, when they turned up we realized that we have one of each – Nakshatra (girl) and Nishanth entered our world on September 24th, 2009.
(Note: In India parents are not allowed to know the sex of baby before they were born, hence the surprise)
My 6 Daddy years…
A quick TODAY()-DATE(2009,9,24) tells you that it has been only 3 years since my kids were born. But I have amassed 6 daddy years, thanks to raising twins!
In these 6 years, there were a handful occasions when I felt like sending a classified ad to newspapers to this effect:
Take one or both. 2 lovely kids, well raised but naughty. Potty trained and can brush their teeth. Hurry up!
But better sense prevailed and we kept them 😀
To be honest, they are not all that mischievous. But sometimes they get on our nerves so bad.
A dinner to remember
After spending probably zillion nights eating at home, one day, my wife declared, “Honey, lets go out tonight.” We usually leave the kids with our in-laws (they live close by) when we do this. But that day we must have been possessed by cruel demons. Why else would I say, “Lets take the kids along!”
And all 4 of us got in to a car and went. We did a bit of shopping (getting new clothes for kids for their upcoming birthday) and reached the restaurant. Being weekend it was full. So I left Jo & kids at lobby and went inside to book a table.
Let me break this story at this point and give you one basic rule of parenting.
You need 100% attention of one adult per one children when they are in public places.
Coming back to the lobby, as I walked inside, suddenly Nishanth and Nakshatra felt liberated & started running like incredible hulk after breaking free from underground army prison. With in a span of 30 seconds, Nakshatra walked to a near-by mini pond and sat on the ledge. As Jo managed to lug Nishanth from the other corner to that pond, Nakshatra made a backward move with a swiftness rarely seen outside tom and jerry cartoons.
SPALSH!
She is drowned up side down and started crying aloud.
Thankfully, Jo quickly pulled her out. But now all her clothes are wet and she is shivering a lot.
Fortunately, we had new clothes in the car. So I took her to the car and changed. By the time I got back, Jo already got us seats and ordered something. So we started eating. And then, Nakshatra wanted to pee. So Jo took her to the rest-room. And then Nishanth started running behind them. So I followed him.
Meanwhile a clever waiter noticed an empty table with no food items. He promptly asked the next group to occupy it.
When all of us got back, we had 4 strangers looking hungrily at our order of chicken something, Indian breads & something else!
I will not bother you with how the rest of dinner, drive to dessert place and drive back home went. But rest assured that we had few more nasty surprises.
The car that wont start
My kids have taken a strange fancy to keys & key holes. Once every few weeks they invent a hare-brained scheme to spoil a lock, key or something. Once when visiting family friends, my son has managed to bend my car keys by 900. Fortunately they had a hammer and we could twist it back.
But we are not always so lucky. Recently, in one of their invented games, they poked small sticks in to the key hole my car. Later when I tried to open the door, it was jammed. I ended up calling the service center folks and they sent a technician who gave me the look, “Sucker! I am sure you will become a regular customer”.
This is not a one off thing. I had same experience with my bike key hole, car trunk key hole and our gate locks. And did I tell you my kids derive a lot of pleasure locking the doors when we are in bath?!?
But its not all that bad
If there is one thing I am doing more after my kids are born, it is laughing & smiling. We (Jo and I) laugh at least a dozen times everyday watching the kids. They make us immensely happy. It is a joy to watch them grow, take good care of each other and learn things. Their innocent smiles and immense curiosity put us at ease almost immediately even when we are tired, stressed or worried. And that is worth more than a jammed key hole or spoiled dinner.
I wish you many more years of happiness, health & wealth Nakshatra & Nishanth. Now go and have the cake.
Just don’t spoil your new clothes 😛
PS: If you have kids, Learn Excel. You will have more free time to chase those little lunatics.
49 Responses to “Project Management Dashboard / Project Status Report using Excel [Part 6 of 6]”
[...] display milestones Part 4: Time sheets and Resource management Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
Excellent!
I was looking forward to this and you've done it again...Shame I can't claim it was all my own work 😉
ps hope you're getting enough sleep
Excelent !!! Tks to share your knowledge with us.
Izabel
Sao Paulo - Brazil
Nice job!.
I'm also keen on PM Excel Dashboards. Please, take a look at
http://screencast.com/t/TyaxH5r4mDf
That's one example of my Project control Spreadsheets.
Cheers
Hi Miguel,
Do you share your PM Excel Dashboards? It looks awesome.
Regards,
Germán
Hi M. Miguel,
Can you share your Excel Dashboards? Awesome work BTW.
Regards,
Michel Levesque
Can you share the PM excel template?
[...] haired Dilbert hat zum Abschluss einer Artikeserie zum Thema Projektmanagement mit Excel eine Anleitung zum Bau eines Projekt-Dashboards veröffentlicht. Ein Dashboard ist eine Visualisierungsform für große Mengen von meist [...]
Quite a nice and helpful article. I am sure excel is one of the most used application across many many big companies. And your info on project status update using excel would surely be usefull. Keep up the good work on this blog site. Also to share there are some open source flash-based graphing and charting solution which caould also be used on any project..
http://askwiki.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-create-quality-charts-using.html
@Alex, Izabel .. thank you 🙂
@Miguel: Thank you. Your dashboard looks very good. It is inclined towards the budget and finances of the project. I have kept those aspects out of this series. May be I will revisit the financial aspect of projects at a later point.
@Rishil: Thank you. Yes, you can create flash based charts (or even simple image based charts) and embed them in a project dashboard that can be published to the team using intranet (like sharepoint). This is how large companies usually do it. Thanks for sharing the Askwiki article.
Great looking dashboard!! Do you have a version for the Mac versions of Office available?
Thanks
Chandoo,
this is great piece of collating info.I liked it and shall try using it in office.
Thanks for the all hard work behind this.
Chandoo,
Kudos. This is really as simple as it gets for laymen. We did this sort of stuff in Consulting - but this can now become really simple for people. Will have my team look at this! Great work.
thanks,
Mrigank
[...] I suggest reading my 7 part series on project management using excel. Starting with Excel Gantt Charts to Project Dashboards. [...]
Just downloaded the project management template bundle...great!
Have you done anywork on a Project Portfolio Dashboard template?
@Bw... Thanks for getting a copy of the templates. 🙂 I have worked on few assignments where we built such templates. But these are similar to other regular dashboard templates. I will share some of these ideas in a later post someday. Meanwhile if you have any ideas on how to structure project portfolio dashboard, let me know using comments or email.
[...] 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 [...]
[...] display milestones Time sheets and Resource management Part 5: Issue Trackers & Risk Management Project Status Reporting – Dashboard Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project [...]
[...] 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 [...]
Thanks fro the great ideas! To get a sense of the layout and design of a Dashboard more geared toward Cost and Schedule anaysis, check out the example Dashboard at http://www.ProjectDashboards.com which was built entirely in excel.
hey,
i just need a simple Chart where by i can show some of the projects by % wise. no dates required.
1st column Project name and 2nd column will be status (filled with %). can you pls help me out.
Thanks.
@DS... if you have excel 2007, you can use data bars in conditional formatting for this purpose.
Hi Chandoo - this series is an excellent resource and tutorial, thank you for sharing.
When I sat down to consider what my dashboard should look like, one of the most important features for me is to be able to maintain version control and to show simply on what version is on display.
Apart from the naming convention of the file name, is there a good way to do this within a dashboard? I'd be interested to hear your thoughts!
@Larph: Welcome 🙂
> You can do version control thru Macros (but always remember that your audience can disable macros)
> Another option is to use a static time stamp / version number in the title page of dashboard that you update manually whenever you make changes to the file
> In excel 2010, you can keep track of file versions from File menu. This can be used to select a previous version of dashboard.
> Best option is to use a version control system like SVN or upload files to Sharepoint or something like that. This will take care of versioning for you (although it is a bit technical and dashboard audience may have difficulty figuring the versions out).
> The easiest option is to use filenames and the CELL() formula to get the version number (or date) from the filename so you can show it on the dashboard.
Hi Chandoo... I'm following you from Brazil...
I would like to thank you for the tips about excel, mainly with dashboards ... It helped me a lot …
Take care...
Di
On the dashboard when I print, the text is blanked out in the middle of the Issues list - suggestions on how to fix?
[...] Project Management Dashboard in Excel [...]
Hi Chandoo, do you have an equivalent Project Management Dashboard / Project Status Report for MS Office 2010?
As a Microsoft trainer I'm interested in your choice of Excel for project management. I'm assuming that you've tried Microsoft Project and have decided not to use it? We get folks on our MS Project courses who've tried to use Excel for PM purposes and none of them have made such an impressive project plan, but I wonder is it worth all the effort?
This looks very interesting. How may I be a part of this
Does this template work in Google Spreadsheets?
Many thanks for sharing your expertise with us. Keep up the good work 🙂
Heya i'm for the first time here. I came across this board and I to find It really helpful & it helped me out a lot. I am hoping to offer one thing again and aid others like you helped me.
Hi Chandoo,
Your PM dashboards impressed me so much that I've downloaded the Portfolio and Project Management package. All of the documents look very professional.
I was going through the Portfolio dashboard and I had a question.
When I enter in additional holidays they are highlighted in the gantt chart. Is it possible so that the name of the holiday shows up in the highlighted area of the gantt chart.
Thanks
Adam
[...] Project Status Dashboard [...]
[...] Project Status Dashboard in Excel [...]
[...] Project Management Dashboard in Excel [...]
can you confirm that the downloads will work on a mac - excel for mac v14.3.6
thanks
Made a slight variation on the schedule sheet,
1. Add a date column for start
2. In week column cell use =weeknum() and link to date cell
3. Hide week column
When you enter in a date for each task the week number is populated accordingly
simple but more effective, you can also dynamically link the date cell to your MSP project file for even more automation!!
I purchased a copy of the project management dashboard excel file. I misplaced the password to unlock the file and make modification. Can you please resend the password.
Thank much in advance...
Hi there! I just would like to give you a big thumbs up for your great info
you've got right here on this post. I'll be returning to your website
for more soon.
I bought ur project management template just want to know how to hide the budget section from portfolio?
Hi, Thanks - very good job you've prepared!
You've inspired me as well 🙂
Best regards
Hello!
I am using a gantt chart template which i got from your website. All is good just when I add all my acitivities in data spreadsheet and then go back to gantt chart to view them, I only see first 9 and then I need to keep scrolling for the next ones. is it possible to see most of the activities if not all in the single frame.
thanks for answering!
This is my first time pay a visit at here and i am actually happy to read all at alone place.
I am interested in your dashboard; downloaded the locked version, unable to use it...do you have a user guide that is available that I can see and use on the locked version?
Please send me daily newsletter
Hi,
I downloaded the PM dashboard and the gantt chart only has dates till the year 2016. How do I change this to include 2017 FY as well.
When I enter a activity for this year , it fails to show up on the chart.
Hi
Would.like to purchase the project management .kits
Pls share the payment link in INR
Also share your contact number to speak with you
Regards
Hari
9384825926