In the role of a project manager over several years, I have observed Excel being manipulated and coaxed into doing things it was never designed to do, in my opinion. The culprits are usually project and program managers who need some kind of tool to monitor, track and control projects.
Let's face it. Excel is good at crunching numbers. It's also good at creating and displaying charts/graphs based on crunching those numbers. What it's not good at is displaying images that are not based on numbers or depicting non-numeric data. One example is Gantt Charts. I've seen Project Managers color bunches of cells on a row to simulate a task's duration. Another Project Manager I knew used to draw a vertical red line with arrows at each end to indicate the current week on a project plan (Gantt Chart). For this, he used the caret symbol ('^') to simulate the upper arrow tip, a 'v' to simulate the lower arrow tip and the pipe ('|') symbol to show vertical lines. These are extremely clunky and laborious ways to achieve an objective. There are many tools that are designed to present this information and it is far more sensible to use them rather than force Excel to do it.
The worst part is when senior leaders in an organization are impressed with such Excel artifacts and decide to make it the "template" for others to use. Then, other Project Managers are forced to bend over backwards and use these complex templates for their own projects even if they hate them.
Let's face it. Excel is good at crunching numbers. It's also good at creating and displaying charts/graphs based on crunching those numbers. What it's not good at is displaying images that are not based on numbers or depicting non-numeric data. One example is Gantt Charts. I've seen Project Managers color bunches of cells on a row to simulate a task's duration. Another Project Manager I knew used to draw a vertical red line with arrows at each end to indicate the current week on a project plan (Gantt Chart). For this, he used the caret symbol ('^') to simulate the upper arrow tip, a 'v' to simulate the lower arrow tip and the pipe ('|') symbol to show vertical lines. These are extremely clunky and laborious ways to achieve an objective. There are many tools that are designed to present this information and it is far more sensible to use them rather than force Excel to do it.
The worst part is when senior leaders in an organization are impressed with such Excel artifacts and decide to make it the "template" for others to use. Then, other Project Managers are forced to bend over backwards and use these complex templates for their own projects even if they hate them.
