Showing Project Health in Excel

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

How do you tell your project’s sponsor that things are going well, or not as well as expected?

Creating a Gantt chart that clearly lays out the health of various tasks in your project is often required, but it can be difficult to do. Often, we see the “horse blanket chart” with red, yellow, and green buttons on a matrix with no other information.

With OnePager Express, you can show tasks from an Excel spreadsheet along a timeline, and use color to represent project and task health with the traditional red, yellow, and green color-codes. Don't have OnePager Express? Download a free 15-day trial and follow along:

1. Once your Microsoft Excel project plan is updated with task and project health indicators, just add one more column to tell OnePager Express which tasks you want to display. In the example below, we use a “Health” column for each task, and a “Show it” column to filter the spreadsheet:
   
   
   
   This is an example, but it will illustrate how the “Health” column can be used to emphasize project and task health in a timeline view versus just looking at the “table” above.



2. With the flag fields set and the data ready, just click on the OnePager Express button on the MS Excel tool bar or Add-ins tab, and the wizard below will appear:
   
   
   
   In the wizard above, we’ve noted where you type the project name and set the snapshot (status) date.



3. Click Next to proceed. You'll now be taken to the second page of the wizard that allows you to map the columns from your Excel spreadsheet into OnePager Express:
   
   
   
   This mapping page shows that we want color to be dynamically driven by the “Health” column in the sample MS Excel file.



4. Now just click the Create new project view button and OnePager Express will build the following timeline view:
   
   
   
   The timeline has color-coded each task by the status kept in the Excel spreadsheet. It's also grouped the chart into swimlanes based on the phase, and has labeled each row with the resource assignments.

When you create a timeline view from Microsoft Excel using OnePager Express, you can always be sure that your schedule is based on your exact data from your Microsoft Excel file which OnePager Express NEVER changes. You can customize the look of your timeline view for different audiences and for addressing different issues. What’s helpful is that OnePager Express remembers your customizations and uses them in creating timeline views later to represent project changes until you desire to change the look and feel of the views for new needs. Customizing can take several forms:

• Group, sort and color-code tasks and milestones by any field in Microsoft Excel (phase, resources, etc.)
• Generate a project view legend that makes sense for your audience
• Reposition tasks or milestones, swimlanes, and rows anywhere on the page with a drag and drop interface.
• Visually display important project data like percent complete and baseline start and finish dates
• Change task labels without corrupting your original MS Excel file
• Customize the time-axis to show all or part of a project and to show any time units (weeks, months, etc.)
• Refresh your timeline view with updated dates and task completion percentages any time your Microsoft Excel schedule file changes.

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