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.

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.

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.

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.