Project progress spreadsheet vs. schedule

Experienced project managers use project progress spreadsheets and project progress schedules every day to make their projects more predictable. Do you know what the difference between these tools is? Maybe you are at the beginning of your project management career and do not know the difference. But learning to use project progress spreadsheets and schedules will allow you to be more competent and skilled so your projects will get a higher probability of success. When you know definitions of both spreadsheet and schedule, you can better understand these project management tools.

Both tools provide an up-to-date status report allowing project managers to measure effectiveness of time management and project management techniques that have been applied. However, the work sheet is a document that reflects actual progress of your project in terms of resources consumed and goals achieved. It allows reviewing project tasks and tracking project activities by status, due dates, resource assignments, and costs. Usually this document is created by means of software that has a spreadsheet building function and supports user collaboration in order to allow permitted users to access and view sheets.

schedule is a time management document that reflects actual process of the project in terms of working hours allocated to your project. It is used to plan and then track time-based characteristics of your project and can be a part of plan. Project management software which features a time scheduling function is required to create, manage and share schedules.

As you may see, spreadsheets give you information for making estimations and assessing effectiveness of your project in terms of resources consumed and goals achieved while schedules contain information about time-based characteristics of your project (like due dates, timelines, time-frames, etc.) By using project progress spreadsheets, you can track project spending and resource allocations while schedules will let you track tasks, agendas, calendars and sheets of tasks.

Task Tree view and Task List view are two elements of the project progress dashboard for creating project trees and tracking project tasks. In VIP Task Manager, each task has "Status" field that shows progress per task. In Task List view you can review progress per task as well as total status bar – the software automatically sums up "Status" fields of all tasks. Task Tree view will help you create spreadsheets. Task List view will help you track and report your sheets. Task Tree view also allows developing graphs (charts and diagrams) by using Charts Panel.

Scheduler view will help you develop calendars and schedules. This project scheduling tool allows creating and tracking timelines.