The Project Planning and Management template is designed as a generic, affordable, Excel based solution to plan and manage any project. The ability to build the projects budget as tasks are identified facilitates the processes of business case proposal, valuation analysis, and securing the required funding. Project dynamics can be altered and performance monitored with best practice Earned Value Analysis throughout the complete project lifecycle.
Key features of the Project Planning and Management template include:
Ability to define project budget as tasks are defined;
Pre-define project phases, task titles, holidays, and other key project parameters;
Creation of task dependencies and timing constraints;
'Auto-timing' function calculates optimal project schedule automatically;
Gantt schedule charting with mouseover details;
Project status reporting based on best practice Earned Value Analysis;
Emailing of participant task lists and creation of individual participant workbooks to enable updating of task progress from remote workbooks.
(Requires Microsoft Excel 97 or higher)
IMPORTANT NOTE for Macintosh users:
Due to this product's integration with some Windows API functions, this template is not compatible with Excel on the Macintosh operating system.
Critical Path project management planning tool, an inexpensive alternative to Microsoft Project.
Features:
Calculates Early Start, Late Start, Early Finish, Late Finish, Float (Slack) and identifies Critical Path activities.
Calculates and summarizes resource costs.
Shows all project data in a "spreadsheet" pattern for ease of understanding.
Data may be manually entered or imported from a file or the clipboard.
Independent re-sizeable and hideable windows show PERT views and Gantt (bar chart) views of the project in addition to the "spreadsheet" view.
Activities and links may be set up and edited in either spreadsheet or PERT views or both at once, since all views are kept synchronized.
Up to 1,000 activities. No limit on links per activity (within total of 1,000 links). Links may be Finish-to-Start, Start-to-Start or Finish-to-Finish to handle overlapping activities. Links may have minimum time lags specified.
Individual activities may have their dates "fixed". Pop up "working day" calendar with 200 year range. Easy to change working/non-working days. Activity durations and lags may be specified as either "working days" or "calendar days" - both types may be used in the same plan.
Scale of PERT and Gantt charts are adjustable both on-screen and for printing (to make best use of pages). Reports, PERT charts and Gantt charts may be either printed, or copied to the clipboard for pasting into other programs.
Each project may have its own resources list, or master resource lists may be maintained for use across projects.
Activities may be grouped into up to three levels, with resource cost summaries available at each level. On a network other users may have read-only access while one user has a file open for exclusive update.
BUY PRO VERSION - Added features for large plans and for use in a corporate environment. Resource Allocation and Leveling; Costing Functions; Administrative Detail Editing (Notes assigned to tasks, Cost Account Codes, Manager Names, Unique Key for use in exporting to external databases); Choice of Language for Dates (Language of current version of Windows - the default in "basic", English, French, German, Spanish, Roman Numerals, User Defined); Automatic Emphasis - an aid in selecting exporting details; Hiding and Inactivating Dependency Links Grouped into "Families"; Specifying "Marginal" Criticality; Optional web page (HTML) output of reports.
