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Project management in Excel: What to consider
Managing projects in Excel only takes you so far. What does your team actually need to stay on track? Between product budgets and task lists, you'll soon realize spreadsheets weren’t made for project management.
Go beyond spreadsheets to manage your projects
To successfully manage teams and complete project tasks, you need more than an Excel spreadsheet. The best tools for project management let you:
Keep project details in one place
Spreadsheets don’t give you the ability to add details, have conversations, or attach files, so you end up scattering project information across a suite of tools, making it too easy to miss something on your to-do list or waste time hunting down an asset.
A good project management tool combines the grid-like view of a spreadsheet with collaboration features—so you can say goodbye to digging through old email chains for the latest updates or files.
Quickly build and maintain plans
If you’re managing projects in spreadsheets, you may also spend a lot of time building calendars and Gantt charts from scratch. Even with a template, customizing, formatting, and keeping your project plans up to date takes up a lot of your time.
Unlike Excel, agile tools designed for work and project management make it easy for you to quickly create and update dynamic project plans.
Easily manage multiple projects and programs
Without a place to store all your project information, it’s hard to know the status of your entire program or switch between projects quickly. If you manage a team, it’s even more difficult to see an employee’s workload across all of them. With a more powerful project management tool, you can easily gain these insights to help with project tracking and resource management.
Collaborate easily and effectively
Spreadsheets aren’t built for collaboration, but other project planners are. Instead of juggling Excel project trackers, emails, chats, and docs to keep track of all the moving pieces, manage your projects from a single source of truth. Project and work management tools let you keep all project conversations and files connected to your plans, so you never miss a beat.
Goodbye Excel. Hello Asana.
Asana is project management software that makes it easy to manage all kinds of projects, from marketing to engineering. Instead of organizing and updating spreadsheet trackers, spend your time on getting results. No advanced Excel skills required.
Learn more about AsanaHowever you manage projects in Excel, do it better in Asana
Excel templates are good, but Asana's are better for project management.
Use our pre-made templates—or make your own—so you can spend less time re-thinking your roadmap and more time getting work done.
Never make another copy of a Gantt chart template again.
Visually map out project timelines, schedule tasks, and get a clear view of who's doing what and when with Timeline view.
Excel project trackers fall short on collaboration and communication.
With Asana, you can follow tasks to get notifications on progress or completion, comment directly on them, add due dates, assignees, and more.
How to turn spreadsheets into Asana projects
Moving to a new tool can be tough. Fortunately, it’s easy to import your existing projects from Microsoft Excel to Asana using our CSV importer.
Learn more about the CSV importerTeams that want results trust Asana
We decided to give Asana a try. We were quickly able to eliminate the drudgery of sending update emails and reporting on progress in weekly meetings. Now, if I want to know what’s going on with a project or what the status of anything is, I just look at Asana and everything is instantly clear. Asana makes our process so much more efficient. It removes all the waste in communication.
—Rian Hunter, Software Engineer, Dropbox
Upgrade your project planning from spreadsheets to Asana today
See why millions of people use Asana to get better work done.