Do You Really Want to Use XL to Create Gantt Charts?

Microsoft Excel and other spreadsheets are great tools. Don’t get me wrong. We all use them for a lot of purposes, and they are intuitive by design with their columns and rows. Extremely nice when you want to organize your “stuff”. And they are good when it comes to number crunching, financial analysis, and creating all sorts of lists, including task lists.

Bu do you really want to use it to create your Gantt Charts? It does not strike me as the most obvious tool for this purpose, and spreadsheets were never designed or intended to be used as a Gantt tool. Still, many people and organizations use them because they are familiar with excel spreadsheets and the software is already installed as part of their office-type application suite. So, there is no need to buy additional software. Spreadsheets feel familiar and comfortable to all of us.

You will easily find step-by-step guides and videos on how to use Excel to crate Gantt charts and just as easily you can find companies and consultants promoting their packages of templates for creating Gantts.

Gantt charts are quite useful and an important tool in project management, but there are better solutions than using spreadsheets. You should look for something that is purposely built. Here are some aspects you should think carefully about if you are using spreadsheets:

• There are a lot of steps involved in setting up the template.
• Everything is very manual.
• If changes to your schedule occur, it’s like starting over again.
• There are no calendar functions involved that allows you to except work from taking place in non-work periods.
• You can't add any logic between activities. You need to schedule manually. As the number of activities grows, this becomes complex and close to impossible.
• There is no time analysis that automatically tells you when activities can start and finish.
• There is no easy way to resource load your schedule.
• The lack of project tracking features makes it hard to report progress, and hardly anyone does, so you can’t tell if you are ahead of or behind schedule.
• There are no reports that make sense. Project management software gives you reports and charts that make it easy to see how your project is going.
• Limitations in scalability, large problems become problematic.
• It’s not efficient and the amount of time and the cost in terms of time is higher than any suggested savings you get from not investing in project management solutions. All the time you put in your excel sheet can be spent on things that actually matter.

Why Invest in Project Management Solutions

At some point in time, you will get tired of updating and re-doing your templates and want to invest in project management software. Gantt charts are important tools of project management software. Below are a few of the advantages you will get:

• Quick and easy to set up schedules.
• All date calculations handled by Critical Path Method time-analysis, meaning you don’t have to build in formulas to calculate dates or project span.
• Add links between activities to ensure work is planned in the right sequence.
• Apply calendars with work and non-work periods.
• Easy to organize and summarize by project phase, discipline, trade, and more.
• Collapse or expand (parts of) the schedule to show the right level of information.
• Focus on the critical path that is driving your project end date.
• Easy to update the project with progress and see any ripple effect of lateness.
• Create reports ensuring that what you show and communicate stem from the latest updates to your schedule.
• Click and drag to change durations.
• Assign resources to the activities (resource loaded schedule).
• Use filtering capabilities to narrow and focus attention to important issues.
• Use appropriate views to keep different stakeholders updated.
• Ability to perform what-if analysis.
• Compare your current schedule against the baseline.
• Use different shapes and bars for each activity to highlight and enhance the usability and the Gantt as a communication tool.
• Easily import project data (and export).

Using the right tool gives you a distinct advantage. Both in the planning and scheduling phase and during execution. Managing projects and project information such as deadlines, milestones, the critical path, resource assignments and resource schedules and the need to clearly communicate the schedule, the status, time and resource issues, the effect of delays and missed milestones are all indicators of when to use project management software.

Project management software has been designed to be the best tools to manage projects through the whole project life cycle. Not just by making it easy to plan or create a Gantt chart, but to track, analyze and communicate project data and turn it in to information. We invented them to give you an advantage and immediate gains in control and productivity.

Scheduling and project management solutions come with different capabilities and richness of features. Check out our website for planning, scheduling, project control and risk analyses and Risk Management Solutions. If you are looking for a simple solution that fits the “I Just want a Barchart” bill, I suggest you take a closer look at Safran Planner. Do you need more power, check out Safran Project.

Should you like to learn more about Gantt Charts, check out our previous blog on The Gantt Chart - A Working Tool of Management or download The Gantt Chart PDF.