Excel for Project Managers

This 2 day course will help project managers and analysts save a substantial amount of time in their project management activities, learn better solutions to their existing problems and help them plan more effectively.

This hands-on course is divided in three main modules, Planning & Budgeting, Tracking and Reporting. It will systematically teach you how to tackle the different problems involved in project management with the help of real life case studies.

 

 

 

Introduction 

 

• What is project management?

• Key project phases (Initiation → Closure)

• Why use Excel for project management

• Overview of Excel interface & productivity shortcuts

 

Project Planning Fundamentals

 

• Defining project goals, scope & deliverables

• Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) basics

• Identifying stakeholders

• Creating WBS templates in Excel

 

Task & Schedule Management

 

• Listing tasks & sub-tasks in Excel

• Creating dependencies and priority levels

• Using dates & duration formulas

• Conditional formatting for task categorization

• Creating a Gantt chart (manual and automated)

 

Resource Management

 

• Assigning roles and responsibilities

• Building a resource matrix

• Estimating effort

• Resource allocation tracking in Excel

• Workload heatmap with conditional formatting

 

Budgeting & Cost Tracking

 

• Introduction to project budgeting

• Cost categories: labor, materials, overhead

• Creating cost estimates in Excel

• Actual vs. forecast tracking

• Variance analysis

 

Risk & Issue Tracking

 

• Identifying risks and issues

• Risk register (probability × impact scoring)

• Prioritization with conditional formatting

• Mitigation planning and tracking

 

Communication & Reporting

 

• Project status reports

• Dashboard design basics

• Pivot tables for reporting

• Excel charts for project reporting

• Dynamic dashboards with slicers and tables

 

Excel Functions for Project Management

 

• SUM, AVERAGE, COUNT

• IF, IFS

• VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP

• INDEX/MATCH

• DATE, NETWORKDAYS

• SUMIF / COUNTIF

• Data validation for project inputs

 

Collaboration & Version Control

 

• Commenting & notes

• File sharing options

• Version control best practices

• Project templates

 

Automation & Advanced Tools

 

• Excel tables & dynamic ranges

• Pivot tables for analytics

• Intro to Macros/VBA

• Power Query

• Power Pivot integration