PowerPoint 2010 and Excel 2010: Perfect Partners for Tracking Projects

The challenge for every project manager is to keep their project on track, on time and on budget and the best way to accomplish this is to have up to date, reliable information and real time communications. While Microsoft Project is a great tool for managing large projects, for those of us working on smaller projects of 30 tasks or less, a well-designed Excel spreadsheet combined with PowerPoint can be just as effective. To that end, I've created an Excel Project Plan template that allows you to efficiently estimate time and costs, create the project schedule, monitor the schedule and budget and manage the resources and risks as well as document lessons learned. The template also includes the graphs to create PowerPoint dashboards for your project team as well as your project client.