Excel

Hello,



Excel for planning. Waste of time.



There is a danger in presenting excel as planning tool, generally colorful graphs and bars that come in with excel drawing tools. The problem will start the moment the client or PMT will like the colorful presentation of excel and feel that the project is doing fine because the colors look pleasing to look at.



Believe me guys, in this environment, you will end up doing both excel planning and primavera planning. In addition you will reconcile the figures generated by the two software. As the project moves on, you will look at the contract to ascertain which planning software to use. If the contract require to use P3, then, you will ask "why are we doing excel planning?". At this period, it is too late to back out and use only P3 because you establish a precedent (P3 planning and excel planning).



I do believe excel got a place in planning, as a worksheet to do preliminary planning computation, export import, etc.



Only an idea. IMHO.



Cheers,



Charlie

Hoping the category for "Excel" would be started soon.



May we hear from PP Admin?

Hi,

The Excel is good to do "global changes" outside the Primavera and load back to the Primavera database. A lot of tedious work can be eliminated this way. In this forum we can share little tricks about this database management not about the Excel as a planning tool.

Best Regards

Katalin

Hi Bill,



Will e-mail it tomorrow, it is an experience in formatiing, maybe someboby has a use for it

Hi Bill/Alex,



If you guys are interested, I could e-mail you an excel spreadsheet, that will blow your minds, and could have been done so simplistically but we have to have the experts.



The point is KISS (Keep it simple stupid) It takes a whole day to update this file, and more, and it robs me of time to walk around and sort out problems. The point is do not develope reporting systems that hook you up to your computor permanently, and if you want these systems, rather employ a data capturer, as it is more than likely you are not looking after the project.



Excel is a tool as is P3, however, P3 or whatever programme you are using is supposed to give the answers. So how can a survey tell us what we need to use. Polls are for politicians, not for engineers.

Agree with Alex,



Excel is mostly a presentation tool and cannot be used for planning.



Also a platform to discuss issues regarding the various features and options of excel for better presentation sounds like a great idea.

Sounds like a good idea to me. I’m forever handing out tips on how best to use Excel to compliment what P3 / P3e do. Especially to the poor Engineer who came to me with 3 sheets of A2 paper stapled together and a fantastically coloured set of bars.....

Dear PP



Excel - Interesting Topic



I went to a conference here in Australia, Primavera biggest competitor - guess who - MS Excel



I see engineer try to put together a project report in a excel chart, with activity bars, drawing ...



the first report look great, they try to replicate it for 40 projects, still look very good and management love it.



However, the down turn came when management want to group the projects together, try to find out the critical resource, need to update their progress, then the engineer found out that they are screw up badly. It will take them 3 months to produce such report.



The point I try to make in here is, Excel is good for begineers, when you only have 10 activity you can manage, because it is only a presentation tools that why management love it. When you increase the complexity just a little bit, Excel will fail, fail as a scheduling tool, may be still good as a presentation tool.



Excel skill is needed for presentation of data, scheduling power is require to back up the "Pretty" looking report



In term of having a area to discuss EXCEL for REPORT PRESENTATION I agree, for PLANNING, I totally disagree.



Cheers



Alex

Agree with all and where do we start and who starts it !!!



Cheers



Sunil

Hi guys,



It is probably the most practical tool we have at hand to use to prevent the tedium of trying to use planning programs, and improve everybody (those with the concept) by 500% Agree with Bill

This idea should be implemented coz most of the engineering working is carried out in Excel.



Also P3 and Excel both are interlinked in planning and Excel is basic tool before starting P3.