Anyone done project management using an Excel spreadsheet?

[janegrey]

I've posted this in geeky stuff too.

I'm co-managing a project for my department which is fairly complex and will involve handovers while people (including me) go on leave.

So, I want to tackle it properly and draw up a milestone planning chart. But it'll need to be on a Microsoft Office format - most likely Excel I'd think, as that's what we all have access to.

It's a while since I did my project management training so I'm going back through my notes about how to do this properly, and I've never used a spreadsheet to plan it before.

Does anyone have an example of how it might look?

The major milestone will be in mid-August, so it's not over a very long timescale.

TIA

Hi, I have used excel for a project plan at work recently.

Unfortunately I can't send you across the document because tis work related but basically had first column with action points i.e. 1.0 and sub actions. Then The actions themselves in another column, then by column, responsibility, date to start, date to end, % complete, milestone y/n, comments. Once actions were complete I would shade in the row.

However as excel won't allow you to create a dynamic spreadsheet it only works if there aren't too many dependencies and you aren't adding in lots of additional actions.

Hope that helps a bit.

Thanks Rookie - that's exactly the sort of advice I was looking for