As you may new, the newest version of Excel is out for a while. I have been using it since last 6 months and enjoying it. Today, lets understand 10 things in 2013 that wowed me (and probably you too).
Flash Fill
Imagine Flash (the super hero, not browser add-in) is using Excel to extract the middle names of all his villains. Now, flash being flash, do you think he will slowly type out the middle names one at a time? Of course, he can learn Excel formulas and do it in one stroke. But he is too busy running around & saving earth. So, obviously he would use Flash Fill.
Flash Fill works almost like magic. It looks at what you are typing and sees if there is any pattern in it (based on adjacent columns etc.) and then suggests a fill down option. See this demo.
Bonus Tip: Press CTRL+E to activate flash fill.
Built-in Data Model
The top 3 reasons why analysts & managers spend so much time with Excel:
- Searching for that mysterious flight simulator Easter egg (#)
- Formatting worksheets
- Trying to link up multiple tables of data using VLOOKUP, Copy Paste and black magic.
Fortunately Excel 2013 makes #3 a breeze, thanks to built-in data model. Using Excel 2013 data model, you can link multiple tables with each other (one to one or one to many relationships) and generate powerful Pivot reports & charts with few clicks. Now you have more time to search for flight simulator.
Timelines
These days everybody boasts of a massive spreadsheet. But almost no one needs all the data at same time. We are always filtering data for latest quarter, 6 months starting Mother’s day or 8 weeks from November 1st etc. Of course, you can use auto-filter and select all the dates. But it is a pain.
Thanks to Timelines, filtering for dates is a breeze. You can add timelines for any date column in a pivot table / pivot chart. I am sure your clients & bosses will love it.
Quick Analysis
Depending on your work, you may love or hate it. Quick analysis is a new button that appears when you select a bunch of data. Using this, you can do a lot of quick analysis tasks like adding conditional formatting, charts, sparklines or turning your data in to tables (or pivots). To be frank, I find this a bit of annoyance as my analysis work is never quick!
But I am sure there are tons of people who would find this very useful.
Excellent color scheme
The default color scheme of Excel 2013 is bold, creative and well contrasted. It is a far cry from Excel 2003’s color scheme (which is boring, glaring & poorly contrasted). Now, if you insert a default chart (or table, pivot etc.) from your data, you need to do very little clean up work. It is ready to go!!!
Distinct Counts & more in your Pivot
If you are really quiet, you can hear an analyst in your company screaming with joy once they realize that in Excel 2013, you can get distinct count of values in pivot reports!!!
That is right, using Excel 2013 pivot reports, you can find out distinct counts. No extra formulas or no arrays or no VBA. More power to you 🙂
[Related: Using Distinct Count feature in Excel 2013 – case study]
New Formulas
In Excel 2013, there are many new formulas and improvements. My favorite new formulas are,
- Web formulas – WEBSERVICE(), FILTERXML() and ENCODEURL() (an example on these formulas)
- Information formulas – ISFORMULA(), FORMULATEXT(), SHEET() and SHEETS()
- Logical – XOR(), IFNA(), BITXOR(), BITOR(), BITAND() etc.
Easier Charting
In Excel 2013, there are massive changes in charting. Now you can create combination charts, add secondary axis, set up smart data labels, format the chart or switch styles with ease. Microsoft revamped the default formats too so that when you make a chart from data, it is ready for presentation (with out too many tweaks).
Some of favorite charting features are,
- Recommended charts feature that tells you which charts go well with your data.
- A screen where you can change the chart type for each series easily.
- Common chart customizations are a click away (screenshots 1, 2 & 3)
- Ability to create scatter plots based on a variety of input data layouts (Jon Peltier’s article on this).
That said not everything is rosy with 2013 charting. For example, I do not like that we have to go thru sidebar pane to customize charts (formatting etc.) instead of dialog box.
Animated Charts
One of the slickest things you will notice in Excel 2013 is the animation that you see when you move selection, do calculations or create charts. While this may be annoying to some, I find one good use for it. When you use charts coupled to interactive elements (like form controls, slicers etc.) they look sexier, thanks to Animation. See this demo to understand what I mean.
Power to you
Excel 2013 Professional Plus versions comes bundled with Power Pivot & Power View, 2 excellent features for powerful data analysis & visualization. You can think of these as full fledged BI solutions sitting right in your computer. The only glitch, Microsoft decided to give these features only Professional Plus users. I know it is annoying that home, office, professional level licenses cannot use Power Pivot even if they want to pay extra. What a pity!!!
More on Excel Power Pivot licensing issues & possible solutions.
Related: What is PowerPivot & How to use it?
3 things that are not so impressive
The whole cloud thing:
While it is understandable that Microsoft wants us all to purchase shiny new Surface tablets and use spreadsheets on the go, it seems like a bad idea. It annoys me that when I want to save a file, the first option I see is Chandoo’s sky drive. The process of saving files to sky drive and later viewing them in browsers is very slow and often results in errors or warnings. Instead, for desktop versions, why not make My computer as first preference?!?
Sharing & Social features:
Share to Facebook?!? seriously! Why would anyone want to share their spreadsheets on twitter or facebook? Do we really want facebook to know our annual budget & appraisal ratings (so that they can show us ads that say – Buy our scissors and cut your budget in half )?
Power Pivot is not for masses:
Microsoft positioned Power Pivot as BI for masses, offered it for free in Excel 2010. Then in Excel 2013, they went ahead and implemented a licensing policy that looks just as complicated as my lawyer’s invoice. Why would a for-profit company like MS want to not offer powerful tools like Power Pivot to masses for a fee? Why sell it only to corporate customers thru volume licensing program? beats me.
Bottom line
Despite these minor annoyances, I think Excel 2013 is a well designed, solid & powerful software ready to make more people awesome in their work. With features like tablet compatibility, data model, slicers & timelines, improved UI & color schemes it has quickly become my first choice when I want to use a spreadsheet (I run Excel 2010 & 2013 on same computer).
Are you using Excel 2013, what do you like about it?
Are you using Excel 2013? How do you like it? Which features are best according to you? Please share your thoughts and views using comments.
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
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