Category Archives: Excel Tips

Setting a Task’s Finish Time in Excel

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When creating a schedule in an Excel spreadsheet, you will have a Start date and Finish date. But there is also a time associated with those dates, and if you don’t set it, your tasks may appear to finish earlier than expected. In the example below, both tasks finish on the seventh day, but the blue task finishes at 12:00 a.m. and the red task finishes at 11:59 p.m., almost a full day later. Paying attention to the times associated with your dates in Excel will help you ensure that a task is scheduled correctly.

This blog will go over an addition to make to the formula in your Excel spreadsheet to change the time of your task Finish date.

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Phases in Excel Project Plans

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If you manage projects in Excel, you’ve probably come across the need to assign tasks to different phases, especially if your project is somewhat complex. There is a right way and a wrong way to set up phases in Excel, and structuring your phases correctly will make it easier to format your charts in OnePager Express.

Many people think that the relationship between a task and a phase in Excel should look like it does in Microsoft Project, with the phase on top, and the tasks indented underneath:

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Heads Up: Rotten Office Update Headed Your Way

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We have become aware of a critically-broken Office Update that Microsoft began pushing to users this past Tuesday, November 12th.

The update, once installed, will immediately break a number of key Microsoft Office features and many Office add-ins, including OnePager. It also will break any third-party applications that rely on certain Office components to be functional on your system.

In short, it is an unmitigated disaster.

To learn how this impacts your use of OnePager, read here to get more details, and to learn how to fix the issue so that your access to OnePager is not interrupted.

For more general information on the issue, since it impacts many other applications beyond OnePager, read here, and here.

In the meantime, if you have not already been hit by this update, please temporarily suspend Office Updates until Microsoft has released a fix. To turn these off, launch Excel, and go to File > Account > Update Options. Choose to Disable Updates

If Microsoft provides us with more information on how to stop this issue from happening without waiting for their next update to be pushed, we will let you know ASAP.

New Video – OnePager Express Starter Tips: Proper Excel Structure

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Over the next couple months we’ll be creating some videos that outline specific tips to ensure our OnePager Express users understand the fundamentals, and what to avoid, when it comes to using Excel to create and update visuals successfully in OnePager.

Here is the first, which discusses how to structure the Excel data to work properly with OnePager Express.

https://youtu.be/obgRyBYzhf4

Getting Ready for Office 2019

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You may have heard that Microsoft is releasing Office 2019 later this year, including Microsoft Project 2019 and Excel 2019.

Here at OnePager, we’re Microsoft Certified Partners, and have early access to the updates that are coming soon in Office 2019. We’ve been testing OnePager Pro with Project 2019, and are doing the same with OnePager Express and Excel 2019. This way, when Office 2019 is released to the public later this year, you can be assured of seamless upgrades on day one. Many of our enterprise customers won’t see Office 2019 for many years to come, since large organizations can be slow to upgrade, but we also know that some of our customers tend to upgrade more quickly, and we’re keeping that in mind as we complete our compatibility testing.

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Displaying Critical Path in Your Excel Gantt Chart

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We get asked by our OnePager Express (for Excel) users every so often how they can display critical path.

OnePager Pro inherently uses the Critical column from Microsoft Project, which calculates the critical path, to visualize those values.

Excel doesn’t calculate critical path without some intensive programming on your part, and OnePager Express isn’t set up to display critical path like OnePager Pro does (a colored bar at the top of the task bar). But, it is possible. We’ve summarized how it can be quickly done below. For more detail, you can also read our step-by-step instructions on how to build Excel Gantt charts with critical path.

critical-path-in-excel Continue reading →

Display Certainty In Your Plan by Using Conditional Formatting

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I often have users ask me how I would display a level of certainty around a particular milestone or task.

The need exists because the initiative spans many years, and therefore, items in the plan set to begin, or complete, in the near future are fairly certain in terms of their target dates.  However, items further out on the timeline need to be interpreted as loose estimates.

This is actually very easily accomplished in OnePager, as long as you have a column with a value that indicates the various levels of certainty you want to communicate.

backgammon-precision-dice-dark-red_primary

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OnePager Tip: Shorten Task Names for Clarity

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Prior to using OnePager, you didn’t have to consider how much space your project plan’s task or milestone labels would consume in a chart. Regardless of how long they were, you always had to re-type them anyway into whatever other application you were using to create your reports — and most people shortened labels while retyping.  But now that you’re using your actual plan data to drive your visuals, label length is a major consideration.

Take a look at the examples below.  The first has very long labels, while the second uses only what is necessary for the audience to understand what the activity or milestone is.  (Double-click to enlarge each image.)

Too Much Text - Long Task Names Continue reading →

When to use Microsoft Project instead of Excel

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Should you keep managing your projects in Excel, or make the switch to Microsoft Project?

Should you keep managing your projects in Excel, or make the switch to Microsoft Project?

As a company that helps people build project reports no matter what the data source, our users often come to us with questions about which tools they should use to actually manage their projects to begin with. The most common flavor of this question is:

“Should I use Microsoft Project to manage projects, or just stick with Excel”?

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