Project Management - sharing progress using a spreadsheet
  For years I've managed projects and always hit a problem when it comes to keeping track of what's happening. Microsoft Project is the weapon of choice for most project managers, and a great tool. Yet it is both expensive and - outside of the project management community - not widely used. Frankly sending the PDF exports from it to people on my project lacks that sense of being able to touch it and play with it that I'm looking for.
What I've ended up doing is probably what every project manager does - build up a task list using Excel and fake a Gantt chart. Not a satisfactory solution by any stretch of the imagination, but it sort of works when it comes to getting that all important buy in to tracking activity.
Thankfully I've stumbled on this template from Vertex42. It looks deceptively simple - key the tasks down the left, the dates to their right and a Gantt chart pops up. Of course it is a lot more involved than that, with some particularly neat programming using conditional formatting behind it. But that's a technicality.
I've got the OpenOffice version of it to use, mostly because I move between Windows and Mac, although there is an Excel version knocking around. I've also tweaked it, although to be fair to the originators I'm pointing you in their direction for their unedited version.
It will not replace my Project Management skills, but what it should do is help me keep track of what I've planned to happen, and allow me to share progress with what can be quite extended teams.
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