Effective team collaboration is crucial to a successful project outcome. You may have the best talent on your team, but without a skilled project manager who facilitates team collaboration, your team may not perform to its fullest potential.
An experienced project manager can spend days or even weeks defining deadlines, team roles, and budgets for a project. And although some project managers use specialized tools, most still create their workflows using spreadsheet tools like Excel or Google Sheets.
An estimated 750 million to 2 billion people use spreadsheet software like Google Sheets or Excel, and approximately 2 billion people use Google Workspace every month, which includes Google Sheets.
Microsoft Excel has about 750 million to 1.2 billion users. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, credits Excel as the company’s best product: “[Excel] is a symbol of what the company is all about. Think about a world without Excel. That's just impossible for me," Nadella said in 2016.
Although they’re often used as project management tools, Excel and Google Sheets were never designed for that purpose. Both products lack essential capabilities like collaborative tools and important project management tools.
Collaborative work, one of the core aspects of successful project management, is difficult in Excel due to its lack of communication capabilities and project managers can use Google Sheets to develop task lists and timelines, but it lacks functionality for managing resources and connecting requirements across projects.
Because these tools lack the core project management functionality, teams across the globe have to use additional time and resources to adapt them to run their projects.
Unlike Excel and Google Sheets, Spreadsheet.com was created as a project management tool first. It includes all the functionality of a project management tool and adapts to your team’s unique needs.
In addition to familiar spreadsheet functionality, Spreadsheet.com offers a variety of sophisticated features like Gantt charts, Calendar views, advanced sharing and collaboration options, and more that make collaborative work a breeze.
You can find a number of ready-to-use project management spreadsheet templates in Spreadsheet.com’s Project Management Template Gallery.
To get you started, let’s take a look at the top five most popular project management templates:
Just about anything worth doing requires planning. Whether you’re remodeling a kitchen, organizing a holiday toy drive, or launching a startup, Spreadsheet.com’s Project Plan template can make your project much easier.
This template turns a simple task list into a complete project management system by outlining every task, tracking their status, and monitoring key dates and deadlines. With this template, you can visualize your project with little effort. See which tasks are running behind schedule, which team members have time to help, and how these factors influence the overall progress. This allows all team members to have a transparent view of the project’s progress and keep everyone focused on the big picture.
Getting ready to kick off your new product launch cycle? Spreadsheet.com’s Product Launch Plan template helps you manage the process end-to-end.
Product launches require careful coordination not only between the product team but often between marketing, sales, and support. As a result of this complex balancing act, 45% of product launches are delayed and 20% fail to meet internal targets. With this template, you can pull all product launch tasks together and assign them to individual team members and teams. You can also monitor deadlines, task status and progress, and share real-time updates with your team.
According to Project Times, 85% of projects run over budget. That’s where this Project Budget template can come in handy.
By entering project costs and using hierarchy functions to create budget summaries, you can see where you need to tighten your belt – and where you can afford to spend a bit more. This template makes it easy to plan a realistic budget before starting the project.
Break down your project budget into smaller pieces, assign owners, and keep close tabs on labor, materials, and other costs as your project moves forward. And since this Spreadsheet.com template is free, it won’t need its own budget line.
If you are a Gantt chart fan, you’ll love Spreadsheet.com’s Simple Gantt Chart template. And if you have never used a Gantt chart before – you should give it serious consideration.
When you enter your tasks with their start and end dates, the template’s Gantt view will automatically add an interactive Gantt chart to your task list, giving you a bird’s eye view of your project schedule.
Gantt charts are handy for managing tasks with dependencies. Create a cascading timeline and instantly get an accurate view of the status. Reschedule tasks and reassign resources as needed, to keep the project on track.
Managing several projects in parallel is a challenging process, but Spreadsheet.com’s Multi-Project Tracking template was built to ease the burden. Use it to schedule tasks, manage budgets, and assign resources for multiple projects in one place. Monitor scopes, goals, deliverables and deadlines for every project. And with Spreadsheet.com’s native automations, you can get notified any time a task requires attention.
Take Spreadsheet.com’s project management templates for a test drive.
