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Project Health Reports Using Excel

How to represent project and task health in Microsoft Excel project plans


How do you tell executives or clients how your project is doing overall?

Creating a project schedule chart that clearly lays out the health of various tasks is one of the best ways to communicate the overall status of your project. However, this often leads to the “horse blanket chart” with red, yellow, and green buttons on a matrix and no other information.

With OnePager Express, you can show tasks along a timeline, and color-code them based on health. It's easy to do and only takes minutes once you've set up your project plan in Excel. Don't have OnePager Express? Download a free 15-day trial and follow-along with this tutorial:

  1. Open your Excel project schedule. In the example below, we use a “Health” column for the health of each task, and a “Show it” column to filter which tasks are imported into OnePager Express:

    Project schedule created in Microsoft Excel.

  2. Next, just click on the OnePager Express button on the Excel toolbar or Add-ins tab, and the wizard below will appear:

    OnePager Express wizard makes it easy to import an Excel schedule and create a dynamic Gantt chart.

    In the wizard above, we’ve noted where can name your project report and set the snapshot (status) date.

  3. Click the Next > button to go to the next page of the wizard:

    OnePager Express allows you to map your Excel columns to different elements of the Gantt chart. For example, you can color-code by project health.

    This mapping page shows that we want color to be dynamically driven by the “Health” column in Excel file.

  4. Click on the Create new project view button, and OnePager Express will build the following timeline view, complete with color-coded health indicators for each task:

    Project timeline color-coded by health created in OnePager Express using data from an Excel spreadsheet.

    OnePager Express can quickly and efficiently create an understandable, focused, and colorful timeline chart for presentation to stakeholders, team members, or customers.

  5. With the project report (timeline view) produced, just click on the Copy to clipboard button on the OnePager Express toolbar, and paste the view into your PowerPoint presentation to share it with others.


OnePager Express makes it easy to create timeline views from Microsoft Excel 2003, 2007 or 2010. Using OnePager Express will give you dynamic, creative, and focused project schedules with the click of a button, while eliminating the need to redraw your schedules by hand every time your project changes.

Get started today by downloading a free trial or attending one of our demonstration webinars.






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