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How to Make a Product Lifecycle Timeline in Excel

Create an Excel timeline in OnePager Express showing all product lifecycles

Product managers often need to show the lifecycle of multiple products, or the entire product line. If your company has a lot of different products, it can be difficult to track and display all of the diferent lifecycles.

How to make a product life cycle graph in Excel: This product life cycle timeline was created in the OnePager Express add-in to Excel, based on an Excel spreadsheet.

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OnePager Express is presentation software for Excel that makes it easy to create, track, and update a product lifecycle. Your timeline will be easy to understand, and easy to maintain. Don't have OnePager Express yet? Download a 15-day trial and follow along:

  1. We'll start by tracking the product lifecycle in a simple Excel spreadsheet. There is no right or wrong way to create this spreadsheet, but an easy way to track lifecycles is to have a start date and a finish date for each product, which correspond to the product launch and sunset dates. You can also add other product information. In this example, we specified whether the product was all-new or a redesign, and gave each product a classification.
    Product lifecycles are easy to track in a simple Excel spreadsheet.
  2. Double-click the OnePager Express icon on your desktop. When the Start screen pops up, choose New.
    OnePager Express Start screen.
  3. Choose your Excel spreadsheet as the source file for your product lifecycle timeline.
    OnePager Express source file selection.
  4. The easy import wizard will appear. First, give your timeline a name. You can choose to Select all tasks as we did in this example, but you can also filter your Excel spreadsheet if you wanted to create a summary-level timeline without individual detail on every product:
    The easy, redesigned wizard imports Excel spreadsheet information into OnePager Express.
  5. Click the Next button to map your Excel spreadsheet columns to your OnePager Express chart. In this example, we've mapped the "Model Name" column to the task name on the timeline and are color-coding by the "Class" column:
    Select which columns from your Excel spreadsheet you want to include in your OnePager Express timeline.
  6. Click the Create new chart button to import your Excel product lifecycle into OnePager Express and create an initial timeline that looks like this:
    Product lifecycle timeline created in OnePager Express using default settings.
  7. If you want to change the way your product lifecycle timeline looks, it's easy to make edits in OnePager Express. You can change fonts and colors, modify layouts, and reposition pieces of the timeline so that it looks exactly the way you want it. Here is the same product lifecycle timeline after a few edits were made:
    How to make a product life cycle graph in Excel: This product life cycle timeline was created in the OnePager Express add-in to Excel, based on an Excel spreadsheet.
  8. When you are ready to share your timeline with others on your team, go to Home > Copy and paste your chart into PowerPoint or into an e-mail.

OnePager Express is the easiest way to take product lifecycle information and turn it into a timeline that is easy to understand. It's easy to get started with OnePager Express--you don't have to be an Excel expert to use it!

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

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