Should we used Project or Excel?

[Confused]

Hi

We are having a bit of a dileman here. My company has a
small-scare project that about 20 something users will
need to update. None of the users are familiar with
Project so the Project manager wants to use Excel to track
progress. Can Excel successfully be used as a project
management tool for small projects? If not, can project
2000 make it easier to handle multi-user projects?

 

[JackD]

Yes you can use excel, but it doesn't do very well at calculating the
critical path.
I have an example spreadsheet on my site:
You can find it at this page.
http://masamiki.com/project/Excel.htm

-Jack

 

[Don Cooley]

As much as I try to discourage people from using a
spreadsheet to do "real" project management, if none of
the users are familiar w/project and you're not planning
many more of these, then go with whatever works for you
and the group. Trying to get the uninitiated to use
project successfully is frustrating. They'll all be
wanting to hammer in hardcoded dates, get confused between
fixed work and fixed duration, etc, and it will be a mess.
The people will all be frustrated and you'll hear all
about how difficult project is to use. Bottom line is if
you drop back to just using a spreadsheet as a data store
with some simple calculations, you'll be doing the
scheduling, levelling, dependencies, Cp calculations, EV
calculations all manually or with your own formulas/macros
in Excel. But at the end of the day you'll know what
you've got. Just don't let anyone get too carried away
with building the functionality of project into your Excel
tool. There are too many unused reinvented wheels out
there already.

 

[Mark 123]

You might want to have a look at Task Manager 2005 (www.orbisoft.com) too.
It can be 'dumbed down' for the 'average' users by graying out most menu
functions depending on their log-on name.

Regards
Mark