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Making Project Health Reports Using Excel and OnePager Express

How to represent project health in Microsoft Excel project plans

How do you tell executives or clients how your project is doing overall? Creating a project schedule chart that clearly lays out the health of various tasks is one of the best ways to communicate the overall status of your project. However, this often leads to the “horse blanket chart” with red, yellow, and green buttons on a matrix and no other information.

Project health report created in OnePager Express, using data from an Excel spreadsheet.

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With OnePager Express, you can show tasks along a timeline, and color-code them based on health. It's easy to do and only takes minutes once you've set up your project plan in Excel. Don't have OnePager Express? Download a free 15-day trial and follow along with this tutorial:

  1. Open your Excel project schedule. In the example below, we use a “Health” column for the health of each task:
    Project schedule created in Microsoft Excel.
  2. Next, just double-click the OnePager Express icon on your desktop. From the Start screen that pops up choose New, and select your Excel spreadsheet as the source file for your project health report. The wizard below will appear:
    The redesigned OnePager Express import wizard makes it easy to import an Excel schedule and create a dynamic Gantt chart.
  3. Click the Next > button to choose which columns from your Excel project plan you want to import. This is also where you can tell OnePager Express to color-code by the health of each task:
    OnePager Express allows you to map your Excel columns to different elements of the Gantt chart. For example, you can color-code by project health.
  4. Click on the Create new chart button, and OnePager Express will build the following timeline view, complete with color-coded health indicators for each task:
    Project health report created in OnePager Express, using data from an Excel spreadsheet. OnePager Express can quickly and efficiently create an understandable, focused, and colorful timeline chart for presentation to stakeholders, team members, or customers.
  5. With the project report (timeline view) produced, just click on the Copy button on the OnePager Express toolbar, and paste the view into your PowerPoint presentation to share it with others.

OnePager Express makes it easy to create timeline views from Microsoft Excel. Using OnePager Express will give you dynamic, creative, and focused project schedules with the click of a button, while eliminating the need to redraw your schedules by hand every time your project changes.

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

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