Your Free Project Scheduling and Gantt Chart Tool Using Microsoft Excel

About XL-EasyGantt

XL-EasyGantt is a Simple Project Scheduling and Management Tool that is designed to make use of the popular Microsoft Excel program. By creatively utilizing the Excel macros, formatting and simple filtering features, XL-EasyGantt allows high level schedules to be generated fairly quickly with timeline presentation that is great for pre-sales activities and fast communication between clients and team members who do not have access to Microsoft Project. By employing similar columns positioning as Microsoft Project, XL-EasyGantt allows you to easily copy-and-paste the details over to Microsoft Project for further detail planning and work breakdown. Similarly, you can also copy-and-paste from Microsoft Project.

Difficulty in Using Microsoft Project for Simple Project Scheduling and Schedule Distribution

Microsoft Project is a great tool for creating project schedules. However, at times it can be quite an overkill especially you are just going to create a simple high level Gantt Charts during the initial planning stage or to quickly generate draft schedules for your clients during pre-sales stage. Moreover, the distribution of such higher level schedules to team members and clients who do not have access to the MS Project application could be a hassle when your only choice is either to print it as a PDF file using tools like CutePDF or save it as a web format but not without restrictions when it comes to the view or when you need to gather feedback.

Other Tools

There are some Open Source software that are pretty good, one which I particularly like is Gantt Project, however, at that point when I evaluated it, the lack of the "Start" and "End" dates makes it falls short of most project managers' needs. Project Workbench (though is quite complete, but is rather complicated to use, if you already have MS Project you might not have the intention to invest time in learning another heavy tool.

Creation of XL-EasyGantt

Personally I still prefer using Microsoft Excel. Not only that it is easy to use, with conditioning formatting, some simple macros and formulas, makes it pretty good in producing timelines in a short time. Furthermore, most office users already have access to Excel. Unfortunately, my search for a good template, again, had been rather unsuccessful. However, I came across some tips from Microsoft Office support site and MrExcel.com, and picked up a couple of tricks and I decided to work on a version of my own. Hence, the birth of XL-EasyGantt.