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Go to File, then choose Save As …and select PDF (*.pdf) as file format. Excel allows you to save your file as PDF. I prefer PDF because people can’t make any changes to the file.
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This is useful when you need to share the plan with a larger audience using email. You can also export the Excel template in PDF form. In the printing dialog you can scale the content to fit your paper size. Printing only a specific area is useful if you want to visualize a certain project stage only. Next, Excel allows you to either print the entire sheet or a specific area only. Also, choose landscape mode so the plan can be printed full width. I would never go below 11 x 17 in, because if you do the content will be hard to read. There are a few things to consider when making a printout. Add all major parallel projects and activities and create new rows if necessary. It’s a way to avoid resource bottlenecks and burn out of team members. This helps me plan my project around the peak phases of other projects. I also like to include projects running in parallel. If your country is not on the list, just google for bank holidays : That’s why I suggest entering the bank holidays of your country into the dedicated row tagged national holidays. An overview of current bank holidays will simplify project planning. This means you need to extend more labor intensive tasks to the subsequent week. When there’s a bank holiday, you only have 4 days available for project work. Watch this video to see how to create a project plan using the template:Ī few more ideas for using the project plan template in a smart way: Maintain bank holidays For a project involving IT and marketing, you would have two columns, IT and marketing. How you title the columns and how many columns you use depends on your project. An X depicts who has to contribute for a specific activity. That’s what the columns B, C and D are used for. Once you have finalized your project plan, you share it with your team and the people affected by your project.Įverybody who has some responsibility in the project needs to see with one glance what they have to do. Getting approval for something (a goal).Go-live of a new software system (an important activity/goal).Project status meetings (an important activity).For instance you could show admin tasks in grey, conceptual and planning work in brown and the actual doing as green bars.Ī milestone is a goal you are working towards or a very important activity. Examples:
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You can also use different colors to highlight groups of activities. To draw a new activity bar, just select the respective cells and change the cells color. The blue cells in the project plan template show tasks on the timeline: In the example, cells showing tasks have yellow background color. Also the project kick-off is listed as an activity. For example, there is an activity called requirement specification, where we are putting down the requirements of our project. These are the actual things we need to do in our project. When I also recommend is to enable the week numbers in Outlook. This way people know when to block time for your project. For example, you could tell your team: “vendor evaluation will happen in week 6 and 7”. The calendar week system also makes communication easier. Weeks can be identified easily using calendar weeks. Using a weekly schedule means you have to do less editing if tasks are being moved within a week. This means one column represents one week. The template uses a weekly timeline which is shown from column E to the right. You can use a different row color and uppercase style to highlight project phases, just as I did in the example above. Usually in a project you will always have a preparation phase, an implementation phase and a closing phase. Phases help structure a project into blocks of related tasks. Here’s a brief description of the different sections of the template and what they are used for. Still want to use MS Project? Read our tutorial on creating a project plan in MS Project. Then what happens people get caught up fixing their plan and forget to look after their project.Įxcel allows you to draw a project plan the way you want. You change one value here and it automatically changes another value there - leading to unwanted changes. Especially for beginners such tools can be overwhelming. Many people believe they must use complex software like Microsoft Project. There’s a common misconception about tools for project management. Why? Excel is super-easy to use and you can easily share files with other people. To tell you the truth: I almost always use Excel as project tracker. Should you use an Excel project template at all?