MS Project and MS Excel are two popular tools of Microsoft. Both products serve two different purposes. However, despite this many people use Excel for managing their projects. Yes, you can use it for managing your projects. But you will not get as many benefits as you can get by using MS Projects instead of Excel. Keeping this in mind, today we are sharing with you the five reasons why MS Projects is better than Excel.
Project Collaboration
Excel is ideal for managing simple projects that don’t require managers to collaborate with others. However, the majority of project managers have to collaborate with others for projects at some point in time. Thus, if you use Excel for project management then you would not be able to collaborate with others on projects. However, if you use MS Project you can easily collaborate with different teams for your projects. So, do use MS Project if you have to work on projects that require collaborating with different teams. To learn about the collaboration feature of the project management software in detail feel free to join our Microsoft Project Online Training.
Reporting Tools
Excel comes with a large number of data visualization tools. However, creating visualizations with the software is not that simple and can take time. Furthermore, you cannot even create different views for analyzing the project with it. However, by using Microsoft Projects you can easily create visualizations for your project presentation. Furthermore, it also allows users to create different views for analyzing the project without any hassle. So, do use MS Project if you want to create powerful visualization for your project presentations.
Project Management Capabilities
Microsoft Excel does not come with robust project management capabilities. This is because it is mainly a data analysis tool. Yes, you can use it to manage simple projects. However, it is not ideal for working with complex projects. Apart from this, it also doesn’t offer a lot of reporting tools to users. However, MS Project offers a large number of reporting tools to users. So, do use Microsoft Projects if you have to manage complex projects. MS Project comes with robust project management capabilities. Thus, you will not face any problems if you use it from managing complex projects.
Task Dependencies
With the help of MS Project, you can easily find and handle task dependencies. Besides this, you can also use it for identifying reasons for delay in completion of a task. However, if you use MS Excel then you cannot identify task dependencies or identify the cause of delay in a task. Additionally, you can also use MS Project to automatically update the status of tasks. But you cannot use Excel to automatically update the status of tasks. So, do use MS Project if you want to better manage your tasks and task dependencies. You will not face any problems in managing task dependencies if you use it for your projects.
Work-Breakdown
Another advantage of using Microsoft Projects instead of Excel is that it supports work breakdown. Using the software you can break down the entire project and its tasks into small manageable tasks. However, if you use MS Excel you cannot break down your project and its tasks into small parts. Thus, if you use it for your project then you may struggle to manage your project. However, if you use the latter then you can easily manage your project. So, do use Microsoft Projects if you want to easily and efficiently manage your project. To learn how to break down your tasks into manageable tasks in the project management software feel free to join our MSP Microsoft Project Training.
Conclusion
As you can see there are many benefits to using MS Project over MS Excel. For instance, MS Excel doesn’t support collaboration with others. However, the latter supports collaboration with others. So, if all the above advantages thrills you then you must use Microsoft Project instead of MS Excel. You will not regret using it in place of Microsoft Excel.