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Creating Excel-based sprint schedules for Agile projects

How to use OnePager Express with Excel to simplify Agile project meetings

If you are a ScrumMaster, you understand the importance of good planning and keeping each sprint on schedule. Agile timelines are a great way to communicate the important details of your schedule, including sprint planning, standups, and reviews, with each member of your team.

Creating an Agile timeline or a sprint schedule is easy, especially if you already keep a list of important meetings and deliverables in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. OnePager Express will take your task list from Excel and create timelines that everyone on your team can understand. OnePager Express is a Microsoft Excel add-in, so you can launch it directly from Excel without having to export or convert your data. Download a 15-day free trial today, and follow these steps to build your Agile timeline:

  1. Open your task list in Excel. Your list can be in any format you like, but you might want to include things like sprints, standup meetings, ongoing backlog planning, and other scrum meetings:
    Start by opening your agile task list in Microsoft Excel.
  2. You might want to group your tasks by sprint or color-code tasks by the responsible team. To do this, insert a "Team" column (Column E above), and specify the person or team assigned to each task. We will use this for grouping in a minute. To color-code by a particular sprint, or by any other category related to your tasks, create a "Task Category" column (Column F above) and enter the category for each task.
  3. From the Add-Ins tab of Excel, click OnePager Express. (If you haven't purchased OnePager Express yet, you can download a 15-day free trial.) From the Start screen, click New.
    OnePager Express Start screen.
  4. OnePager Express will launch and ask you to name your Agile timeline, which you should do in the Title of New Project View field shown below. You don't need to change any other settings on this page for now:
    OnePager Express imports an Agile task list from Microsoft Excel and then creates a Scrum timeline for use in standups.
  5. Click the Next button to tell OnePager Express which Excel columns you want to import for the Agile timeline:
    OnePager Express lets you select the Excel columns you want to build your Agile Task Board.
  6. For Task Name, select the "Event Description" column. For Color, choose the "Task Category" column.
  7. Click on Create new project view. OnePager Express will import your task list from Excel and begin to create an Agile schedule that highlights all of the important tasks for each team:
    Agile schedule created in OnePager Express
  8. On your timeline, you will now see individual symbols for each meeting. You might want to move these up or down to lie on top of an overall recurring meeting theme, like this:
    Position individual milestones on a summary Gantt bar.
  9. You can continue to fine-tune your schedule, modifying the layout and changing colors until you get something that looks like this:
    Agile roadmap made in OnePager Express: Show a summary timeline of a Scrum project plan tracked in Excel.

Customizable

You can customize your OnePager Express agile project timeline even more before sharing it in a standup, or with other ScrumMasters:

  • Show original sprint dates or percent complete for a sprint
  • Add comment boxes, text boxes, or images to your task board
  • Change the time scale to show all or part of a longer Agile schedule

Once you've set up your Agile timeline the first time, it's easy to update it as your schedule changes from day to day. OnePager Express automatically remembers all of your settings, and will use the same template to create updated views of the same schedule as you refresh your task list in Excel.

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

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