Excel is a helpful program for project and people management. But it doesn’t include specific functions and charts for these tasks. And when you have to take everything from scratch and design your tools, you move your focus from what’s important (project and people management) to learning to use Excel. It makes much more sense to use Excel project management templates and use your time and energy more efficiently. Here are our most helpful and popular Excel project management templates that you can download for free right now.
These 20 PM templates will help you transform your ordinary spreadsheets into powerful tools, giving you the ability to take your project management game to the next level.
The PM templates are offered free of charge are the following ones:
A Project Tracker helps you organize project status reports and maintain an accurate and well-structured project history. At any time, you can look through your project archive and know what milestones were hit, what issues your team faced, and how the budget was spent. Download our free Excel project tracker template here.
If you need an overview of all the tasks and activities in a project, you should have a project task list template prepared. The template includes everything you need to keep an eye on, such as estimated end time and task duration, who is responsible for the task, worked hours, budget, progress, and other valuable insights. Furthermore, it lets you personalize the status to match your project and the company’s culture. Download our free Excel project task list template here.
Unlike a task list, an action list refers only to important actions needed to reach the project’s goals. An action includes several tasks and activities. Sometimes, all you need is to track the progress of actions, check that they are done before their due date, and assign them the right priority. Download our free Excel action list template here.
Most projects have budgets that require constant attention to avoid mistakes. Managing the budget of a project is itself a recurrent task. Each action, task, and subtask has a cost that covers manpower, materials, travel expenses, and any other necessary expense. But you need to track expenses and ensure you don’t spend too much and stay within the allocated budget. A project management budget template helps you keep track of expenses, verify subtotals and costs per activity, and keep the team informed. Download our free Excel project management budget template here.
Project Management Budget Template
A Burndown chart helps you visualize the difference between estimated work hours and actual work hours for each milestone or at regular time intervals. The chart improves your planning skills but warns you when reality doesn’t match the estimate, and you must take action. You can use days or hours as a reference for your Burndown chart. Download our free Burndown Chart template here.
A project management dashboard is a complete spreadsheet with data, statistics, metrics, and charts. It’s useful for project status meetings and presentations but also for project analysis. Having all data in a single place allows you to spot patterns, see what tasks are delayed and what tasks spend too much money, track working hours, and be up to date with everything that’s going on. The project management dashboard is also where to visualize the differences between estimates and real situations, such as the Burndown chart for working hours and budget. Download our free project management dashboard template here.
Project Management Dashboard Template
A project roadmap follows each project stage and organizes brainstorming ideas into doable actions and goals. It has a temporal line (from the start date to the finish) and includes all project actions, tasks, deliverables, and milestones. The project roadmap is an efficient tool for conveying all the information regarding a project to stakeholders, investors, and business partners. Download our free project roadmap template here.
Related: Check our guide covering the project phases in detail: initiating, planning, executing, and closing.
Who doesn’t need a to-do list to track the progress of tasks and ensure the project meets the deadlines? It doesn’t have to be a complex spreadsheet. But it needs to include all the project’s tasks, their due dates, and other task-related information that help you keep an eye on the project and take action before it’s too late. You can go through your to-do list daily, weekly, or monthly, depending on how large your tasks are. Download our free to-do list template here.
A project timeline follows the project’s evolution over time and helps you identify weak points, potential delays, and any issues that might occur during a task or subtask. It usually includes a Gantt chart to allow you to visualize data and monitor your project in seconds. You can also adjust the due date, priority, and status for each task and subtask and share the timeline with employees and stakeholders to keep them up to date. Download our free project timeline template here.
A project risk spreadsheet helps you analyze risks and track their influence on task development. The tool lists tasks, their associated risks, and their status and due dates. At the same time, the project risk spreadsheet displays how many tasks have a particular risk level and status, allowing you to have an overall perspective of the project’s current state. Download our free project risk template here.
A project plan or planner is a visual way of monitoring the development of tasks and subtasks. It usually includes a Gantt chart and all task-related relevant data, such as start and end dates, status, and progress. A project plan spreadsheet may help in Agile project management to track sprints and meet agile requirements. Download our free project plan template here.
Once an issue has been identified, someone has to track how and when it’s solved. An issue tracker is a tool that lists all identified issues and ensures they are solved in time. The tool includes descriptions, people in charge, due dates, status, notes, and anything that’s relevant to issue fixing and helps you document the process from bug detection to solved issues. Download our free issue tracker template here.
Any project involves resources, whether they mean human resources, materials, machinery, software and hardware resources, transportation, or other means. And every resource has an associated cost, which affects the project’s budget. A resource plan keeps an eye on resource management and safeguards the initiative stays within budget. You can use it weekly to keep things under control before they become an issue. Download our free resource plan template here.
A RACI chart helps assign roles and communicate clearly who is in charge of what. The acronym stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed. The chart includes people who do the tasks (Accountable), their managers (Responsible), experts and decision-makers (Consulted), and stakeholders (Informed). It’s useful, especially for big projects with large teams and complex people management. Download our free RACI chart template here.
A SWOT analysis organizes ideas and evaluates available solutions before starting a project. It identifies Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats and helps you understand what you need to do to make a project possible. A SWOT analysis shows where you need to improve or pay attention and what are the strong skills of your team. Download our free SWOT analysis template here.
A project timesheet is a tool that helps you track working hours, identify who is working on what and who is available, spot working overtime or leave clashes, and distribute the working force better. It’s a useful tool for avoiding payroll mistakes and ensuring you comply with labor legislation. Download our free project timesheet template here.
The Gantt chart template allows you to visualize the project’s timeline, tasks’ scheduling, and dependencies. Viewing the project as a list of tasks and subtasks spread over time allows you to easily avoid delays, last-minute tasks, working overtime, and postponing deadlines. Download our free Gantt chart template here.
Gantt Chart Free Template for Excel
A project proposal is a document that convinces stakeholders and business partners to invest in your ideas. It has a particular format and ensures you convey your ideas, plans, and goals straightforwardly. Without a successful project proposal, a project remains a great but undoable idea. Although this is a Word template, we added it to this list because it's relevant to Project management activities. Download our free project proposal template here.
A weekly work schedule lets employees know their calendar for the week. Employees know what tasks they have to do and improve their productivity and time-off planning. A weekly work schedule also benefits the supervisor or manager because they can easily communicate their decisions, plan tasks, swap shifts when needed, or find replacements. Download our free weekly work schedule template here.
Free Employee weekly employee schedule template
An action plan is the first lucrative document that accompanies a project. It includes each stage of the project with tasks and subtasks, the project’s budget and resources, reporting and performance measurement methods, deliverables, and events. The action plan is the blueprint of the project, the bone structure that makes everything roll according to the timeline. Download our free weekly action plan template here.
Conclusion
Project management templates reduce repetitive work and keep you organized and focused. They save you time and energy. After all, so many managers from all industries already use them, which proves their efficiency and reliability. Nevertheless, use our free project management templates as a starting point and personalize them to match your projects and workforce. That’s no such thing as one template for all situations.