The 5 Best Excel Project Management Templates
Looking for Excel project management templates? You’ve come to the right place! I like using pre-designed templates because they save time and help me manage my project more effectively.
If you’re looking for project management templates in Excel, click “Home” > “More Templates.” Then, you can search for an appropriate template that fits your needs.
Table of Contents
Benefits of Using Excel for Project Management
An Excel project management template is handy for several reasons, including:
- Efficiency and Saving Time: Excel templates save you time because you don’t need to create your own from scratch. They’re also dynamic, changing depending on the input, making them very efficient.
- Clear Task Assignment and Management: Excel project management templates help break down project tasks into manageable components. They assign responsibilities to team members, set deadlines, and track task progress, all aided by helpful features like checkboxes, drop-down lists, and progress bars.
- Communication and Collaboration: The templates help to establish effective communication between you and your team. Comments, notes, or discussion sections within the template allow team members to communicate and provide feedback on tasks or project components.
- Resource Management: They help you plan for and manage project resources, including human resources, inventory, materials, equipment, and finances. And there are many more for businesses. Check out my expense report templates.
- Quality Management: They define quality standards and requirements for project deliverables, establish quality assurance processes, and implement quality control measures to ensure that project outcomes meet you and your team’s expectations.
- Change Management: Excel project Templates help you manage changes to project scope, schedule, and budgets, especially when working with a large team. Additionally, you can track document change requests and obtain necessary approvals before implementing changes.
- Progress Tracking and Reporting: Project management templates help you monitor project progress against established milestones and timelines and track key performance indicators (KPIs). They also make it easy to generate progress reports to keep you and your team informed about project status and performance.
- Document Management: The templates help centralize project documentation, including project plans, schedules, inventories, meeting minutes, and other relevant documents, to ensure easy access and retrieval by your team members.
The most efficient Excel project management templates include the following features:
- Project plans
- Schedules
- Budget sheets
- Risk assessment forms
- Communication plans
How To Find Excel Project Management Templates in the Excel Template Gallery
As mentioned earlier, Excel has a wealth of free Excel project management tracking templates that you can easily access.
If you have never used the Excel gallery before, follow these simple instructions and enter a new world of efficiency.
Here’s how to find a project management template in Excel’s template gallery:
- Open Excel and go to “Home” > “More Templates.”
- Type “Project” in the search bar and hit “Enter.”
- Scroll and find a template you like.
- Once you’ve found an appropriate template, click “Create.”
- This will open a new workbook with your template, and you can start customizing it.
Depending on your version of Excel, you can also go to the “Home” menu, click “New,” and search for free project management Excel templates from there.
Just make sure you click on “Edit a copy” in the top right corner or “File” > “Save as” > “Download a copy.”
1. Project Planner Template
The Project Planner Gantt template is a free Excel project management template that you can find in the template gallery.
This template has a simple table for inputting your activities and periods and a Gantt chart dashboard for visualizing the timelines for each activity.
I particularly like this template because it is excellent for tracking the timelines of tasks in a project. However, the downside is that it uses periods for intervals instead of dates, which might not suit your project (that’s why I’ve included a custom Gantt chart in this list, too).
The template has the following features:
- Columns for activity names, statuses, planned start, start duration, and end duration.
- A Gantt chart to visualize the timeline for each activity in the project
- Visual indicators, such as color-coded cells or icons, indicate the progress of the project statuses (e.g., plan duration, actual start, completed).
- Filters and sorting options to organize projects by status, priority, or deadlines.
2. Custom Project Management Spreadsheet Template
If you’re looking for an all-rounder Excel Gantt chart template for project management, this template is for you.
Our Project Management spreadsheet template is versatile and suitable for various project management components.
It’s similar to the standard Microsoft Excel library, but I’ve made it easier to track calendar dates. I have also included more room for project details.
The best features of this template include:
- Detailed task list with columns for task names, descriptions, assigned resources, start dates, end dates, durations, and statuses.
- Drop-down function to highlight overdue tasks, upcoming deadlines, and completed tasks.
- Filters and sorting options to organize tasks based on various criteria.
- A Gantt chart to visualize the timelines for each task.
- Automatic calculation of task durations and end dates based on start and end dates.
- Task tracking for complex projects.
3. Project Tracker Template
This project plan template is simple and easily customizable, with features that let you track multiple projects.
It is a straightforward solution for maintaining a centralized list of projects. This project-tracking Excel template is designed to help project managers monitor and oversee the progress of multiple projects simultaneously and divide labor throughout the projects’ workload.
The key features include:
- A comprehensive table view to track multiple projects simultaneously.
- Columns for project names, descriptions, statuses, start dates, end dates, and assigned employees and project managers.
- A color-coded progress bar to track the progress of each task.
- Work breakdown structure for several projects as part of
- Interactive features, such as drop-down menus, for user-friendly navigation and data entry.
- Filters and sorting options to organize projects by status, priority, or deadlines.
4. Project List Excel Template
This template is also part of Excel’s online template gallery. It is a simple table with columns for different aspects of the project you want to track.
This Project List Excel template is the best for beginners since it’s easy to understand and edit.
One thing to note is that there is no Gantt chart or other visualization, making it more appropriate for smaller projects with fewer stakeholders or employees.
It offers a structured approach to task management, enabling users to create task lists, prioritize activities, assign responsibilities, and track progress seamlessly.
It includes the following features:
- Customizable spreadsheet with columns for different project management components (e.g., task name, assigned to, duration, and work hours).
- Standardized formats for documenting project information.
- Built-in formulas for automatic calculations, data analysis, and reporting.
- Conditional formatting to flag work hours under specific values.
- A “setup” tab will allow you to alter drop-down lists.
5. Project Timeline Excel Template
The Project Timeline template is another Excel template available in the online template gallery.
Using timelines as project management tools makes it easy to visualize the business plan throughout the entire project.
It provides a clear and concise overview of project milestones, deadlines, and critical events, enabling you to understand project progress and milestones at a glance. This task management Excel template is an excellent asset for time-sensitive projects.
The key features include:
- A simple list format to track basic project information such as activities, start dates, end dates, and notes.
- An editable timeline to highlight critical project milestones or deadlines.
- Various sorting options to arrange projects alphabetically, by start date, or by status.
Frequently Asked Questions
How can Excel be Used for Project Management?
Excel has many useful features for project management. These include:
- Charts
- Drop-down menus
- Checkboxes
- Formulas
- Progress bars
These features create an excellent project management template, depending on your needs. I like to incorporate task list tables with a Gantt chart in my templates to keep track of project components, but there are plenty of options in the template library.
Does Excel have a Project Management Template?
Plenty of free project management Excel templates exist in Excel’s template gallery. Alternatively, you can visit Excel’s template gallery to see the full range. Go to “Home” > “More Templates.”
Wrapping Up
In this guide, I’ve explored five of the best Excel project management templates, including some from Excel’s template gallery and some of our own.
These templates are designed to streamline project planning, execution, and monitoring. Each template offers unique features tailored to specific project management needs. Alternatively, look at our guide for the best Excel business templates. I also have a guide especially for project managers who use Google Sheets. You can find that guide here.
Which template did you find most useful? Are there any from the template library you think we should add to our list? Let us know in the comments section below.
Related:
- The Best Expense Report Template for Excel [3 Options]
- A Guide to Excel Dashboard + Dashboard Templates
- Free Multiple Project Tracking Template for Excel (2 Options)
