Thousands of professionals use project management Excel templates and spreadsheets to plan their projects, and I never understood why — until I tried playing the “what does this formula do” game.
The sheer flexibility of Excel lets you create a completely custom workflow, plan projects, track tasks, and manage resources, risks, and reports in any way you want. But creating these workflows takes skill and a lot of time, and — for project managers — time is a precious resource.
So, here are 16 amazing free Excel project management templates that will save you time and make your job easier.
Some, like the project status report template, are simple tables you have to manually update. Others, like the Gantt chart, WBS, timeline, risk, budget tracker templates, and so on, are fully automated with conditional formulas, filtering, automatic calculations, charts, and other interesting features. Feel free to download them and try them out for free, no email required.
NOTE: Please make sure to read the instructions provided in this guide for every template you download. Some of the more complicated templates also contain further instructions for use and customization in a separate tab within the Excel template that you can refer to.
#1 Gantt chart template in Excel
The main feature of this Gantt chart template is, of course, the Gantt chart. Like any regular Gantt chart template worth its salt, this one will show you:
- The dates,
- Work days, and
- A colored line that indicates the duration of tasks.
But, with this particular Gantt chart template, you’ll also be able to track your project phases and milestones. Simply select “P”, “T”, or “M” next to the item name to indicate whether the item is a phase, task, or milestone, and the changes will automatically reflect in the formatting and in the Gantt chart.
Besides the Gantt chart, you’ll also be able to track the basic project parameters, such as:
- The start and end dates with the number of workdays in between,
- The progress,
- Assignees, and
- Which team the assignee belongs to.
Like with all other templates on this list, you can add as many rows to the columns as you wish without breaking the formulas, as well as filter the data in the table and in the Gantt chart.
Since this template can track phases and milestones, it’s particularly well suited to Waterfall project management. If you decide to forgo this functionality, it can be equally useful for other project management methodologies as well.
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#2 Project timeline template in Excel
This project timeline template is perfect for planning and tracking your overall project progress and status since it gives you a visual representation of your planned project timeline and budget, compared to their actual state.
All you need to do is fill out the details of your project plan in the table above and then regularly update the actual progress and spending over the course of the project. When you want to see a visual comparison of the two, simply switch the timeline view from planned to actual in the dropdown list.
This template will not track the various project details a regular task tracker template would, but it will give both you and your stakeholders a big-picture overview of the state of the project.
This is also an amazing template to include in your project status reports.
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Learn how project management templates can help transform the way you work and improve your project’s performance:
#3 Project budget template in Excel
With this free Excel project budget template, you can track your allocated budget and expenditure for each individual task. It enables you to categorize each task according to 4 fully customizable criteria for easier filtering and even track the budget for multiple projects at once.
The template contains 3 major sections: 2 for tracking estimated and actual expenses — according to the previously mentioned 4 criteria and the cost variance between them — and 1 for tracking your contingency costs and expenses. The top of each section shows the totals.
At the very end of the table, there’s a section that shows your allocated budget, estimated costs, and actual costs for each individual task side-by-side for a quick budget overview.
The majority of this template is automated — it automatically calculates the total estimated costs, actual costs, variances, and totals. The template is also customizable to fit your specific project’s needs.
You’ll find further instructions on the use and customization of this template inside the template itself.
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Want to improve your budgeting skills? Try these 6 different budgeting methods and learn how to create your own ideal project budget:
#4 Project dashboard template in Excel — single project
This single project dashboard template lets you track:
- Tasks,
- Subtasks,
- Priority,
- Status,
- Assignee,
- Department,
- Managers,
- Progress,
- Start/end dates,
- Duration,
- Planned and actual budget, and
- The number of days until the deadline.
The first thing you’ll see when you open the template is the dashboard that showcases all the data. Keep in mind that you shouldn’t change any of the data directly in the dashboard. The dashboard will update based on the data you input in the actual project tracking table located in the second sheet within the file you download.
At the top of the dashboard, you’ll find charts showing the overall progress of your project and budget status in percentages, a comparison of the planned and spent budget, and a breakdown of all your tasks based on their status.
The table underneath shows the same data as your actual project tracking table but with a breakdown of your progress, budget, and actual costs per task, as well as a Gantt chart reflecting the project timeline.
You can filter all the data in the table using the dropdown menu within each column or the buttons to the left of the table. When you do this, both the Gantt chart and the bars and charts at the top of the page will reflect the filtered data.
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#5 Project dashboard template in Excel — multiple projects
The Excel dashboard template for managing multiple projects is the same as the template mentioned above, but instead of tracking tasks and subtasks, you can track projects and the tasks that belong to them.
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#6 Issue tracker template in Excel
The issue tracker template helps you keep track of all the issues/bugs that appear, their severity, priority and status, as well as classification, frequency, when they were first reported, who is assigned to them, when they are due, steps to reproduce them, and much more.
Above the template, you’ll find a table that shows all your risks, which category they belong to, and how many of them there are.
This issue tracker template is meant for people who want to track and manage their project issues in more detail. If you want a simpler version of this template, check out the next one!
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For more issue-tracking templates for Google Docs, Sheets, and Microsoft Word, as well as some recommendations for great issue-tracking templates different software have to offer, check out this blog post:
#7 Simple issue tracker template in Excel
For those of you who don’t require too much detail in your issue tracking, here’s a simple issue tracker template with all the essential information and none of the fluff.
This free Excel project management template lets you:
- Track the progress of your issues from the moment they appear until the moment they are closed,
- Prioritize these issues, and
- Assign them to team members to start working on them.
As it’s a very useful feature to have, this template also contains a table showing the breakdown of all your project issues according to their status and priority.
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#8 Project task list template in Excel
Our simple project task list template is formatted as a table that lets you track individual tasks within one project.
This template has columns for:
- Tracking progress,
- Assignees,
- Start and due dates,
- Color-coded priority, and
- Status dropdown lists.
The template also tracks whether the project is at risk and how many days are left until the due date (or how many days the task is behind schedule).
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#9 Advanced project task tracking template in Excel
The advanced project task tracking template lets you track the individual subtasks as well as the estimated and actual cost for each subtask in addition to the basic metrics tracked in the simple project task list template.
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#10 Multiple project tracker template in Excel
Similar to the advanced project task tracker template, the multiple project tracking template lets you track the planned and actual budget, but instead of tasks and subtasks, you can track projects and the tasks within those projects.
All of these free Excel project management templates support an unlimited number of tasks/rows in the table and contain a filter option for each column. With this, you can easily get a preview of the data for a specific task, project, team, person, date, or a range of dates, extract charts, and much more.
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Before you start tracking your project tasks, you first have to create a project charter, define your scope, and set major milestones. We have templates for that too!
#11 Work breakdown structure (WBS) template in Excel (list format)
This work breakdown structure (WBS) template is a simple WBS in list format. All you need to do is select the WBS level of the entry (a number between 1 and 5). Once you do this, the WBS code, as well as the indentations in the “Name” column, will automatically update to match it.
You may use the WBS code for each entry to link to a corresponding entry in a separate WBS Dictionary.
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#12 Work breakdown structure (WBS) template in Excel (table format)
Since there are many ways to create a WBS, I also created a second work breakdown structure template in table form.
In addition to automatic indentations and WBS code numbering based on the designated WBS level, this template contains further information about each entry.
Specifically, it contains:
- The description,
- Predecessors,
- Start/end dates,
- Work days,
- Resources, and
- Cost columns (in case you prefer to add more information to your WBS).
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#13 Risk management template in Excel
The most prominent feature of our risk management template is that it allows you to select the risk probability and severity from a dropdown list. When you do this, the table will automatically show you the overall project risk rate based on the predetermined risk assessment matrix.
Additionally, the template will automatically count the number of risks in each of the 25 categories in the risk matrix.
Other than this, the table contains 18 columns in total that track all kinds of factors to help you stay on top of all your negative project risks, including:
- Risk name, ID, and category,
- Dates when the risk was discovered and when it’s expected to appear,
- Risk owner,
- Status,
- Expected monetary losses, and
- Mitigation strategies.
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Risk management or RAID log? Do you know the difference? Do you need both? Find out what experts have to say in this guide, and get a free RAID log template!
#14 SWOT analysis template in Excel
The SWOT analysis template is a simple, non-automated template that lets you see your project’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats laid out in a clean and organized way.
The template also contains an action plan table where you can create a quick list of the most important tasks that require your immediate attention based on your SWOT analysis.
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#15 Competitor SWOT analysis template in Excel
In case you’d like to see how you compare to your competitors, you can download our competitor SWOT analysis template.
This template is also a simple, non-automated list, but it will give you a side-by-side, high-level overview of your current status compared to your top competitors.
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If you need a more general task list template that will deal with the granular daily or weekly tasks, definitely check out our to-do list template collection:
#16 Project status report template in Excel
The project status report template gives you a one-page overview of your current project status that you can send to your stakeholders for their weekly or monthly updates.
According to Michelle M. Campbell, project management professional, project status reports should be as concise and comprehensive as possible.
Michelle M. Campbell
Project Management Professional (PMP)
“While aesthetics is helpful on a status report, it is more important to have the informative essentials that will guide the reader to arrive at a comprehensive, but concise understanding of the state of the project.”
Following her advice, I did my best to make this status report template as short and informative as possible, but couldn’t help adding some extra flair.
The template contains:
- A field for a brief project summary,
- A table where you can provide a rundown of your project deliverables — along with their RAG status and a short explanation, and
- A field for describing your most prominent project risk or issue at the moment.
The charts and fields on the right show your overall project progress in percentages, along with your top 3 recent achievements and plans for the future.
The template currently has fields for future plans by quarter, but you can easily rename the fields if you prefer to provide shorter-term plans.
Since this particular template is only a status report and doesn’t contain a project tracking table from which charts can pull information, you’ll have to manually update the progress doughnut chart.
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If you’d like to know what else Michelle M. Campbell had to say about project status reports and learn how not to make them boring, check out this guide:
Excel is powerful but complicated — try Plaky instead
Microsoft Excel is undoubtedly a powerful project management tool but only if you know how to use it. Moreover, it has one other fatal flaw — it’s a static tool that makes project communication and cross-functional collaboration needlessly difficult.
As Excel files don’t update in real time, working on a shared file with more people may become hectic. So, maybe you shouldn’t use it for project management.
On the other hand, Plaky is an intuitive and user-friendly project management tool that lets you organize and customize your project management to fit your unique workflow. Unlike Excel, Plaky enables real-time updates, so working with your colleagues becomes a breeze.
Aside from that, Excel is prone to human error — you can inadvertently hide a column or a row or change something in a formula. Plus, since it doesn’t offer an activity log, you may never find out what exactly happened or how to solve a problem (even though it may be a tiny mistake).
Plaky, on the other hand, makes making such mistakes a bit more difficult. Anytime you change something, people who are subscribed to the card get a notification, so nothing goes unnoticed. Moreover, there is an activity log, so you can see when and where the problem occurred. This way, Plaky helps reduce human errors.
On top of this, Plaky has a library of free project management templates you can use to manage your projects if you don’t want to build your own project workflow from scratch. All the templates are customizable and editable. You can tweak them to fit your needs or use them as is — your choice.
So, with Plaky, all your teams are connected to one central management platform with unlimited users, spaces, boards, and items — all that on the free plan! Or, you can check out Plaky’s pricing plans to unlock more robust administrative options.
It’s high time you ditched Excel and elevated your project management game. Try Plaky today!
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