How to track multiple projects in Microsoft Excel on Windows 10

Microsoft Excel is a popular spreadsheet program used to store, format, and organize the data. It is an integral part of most business organization that is used to perform budgeting, create financial statements, create balance sheets, and other accounting functions. Excel Spreadsheets are also most commonly used to perform complex mathematical operations.

For any business to run smoothly, Project management is crucial, and it plays an important role in achieving business deadlines. Excel sheets are used widely for project management to identify critical paths, analyze the latest trends to make effective decisions, plan the projects, and track the projects. That being said, Microsoft Excel has a wide variety of analytical tools and templates that are used by all scales of business to manage and report projects.

Track multiple projects in Excel

If you are working on more than one project, Excel allows you to organize the multiple projects and its resources to achieve strategic milestones. While managing the multiple tasks and tracking multiple projects can be quite challenging, Excel has some amazing project management templates that allow us to organize and schedule multiple projects effectively all in a single excel spreadsheet.

In this article, we explain how to use a Multiple Project Tracking Template Excel to effectively plan and track multiple projects in a single Excel spreadsheet. The template provides a user-friendly interface and consists of Data Sheets to add tasks, multiple project tracking dashboard, multiple projects tracking Gantt Chart, and Project summary. The template allows you to use as many projects and tasks as you wish in a single workbook without any boundaries.  The template is available for free and works on most of the MS Excel version in Windows 10.

Setup the Excel template for tracking multiple projects

Download the free Excel template for tracking multiple projects here and save it to your local drive. Double-click the downloaded file. The Template file opens automatically in Microsoft Excel.

Now click on the Data Sheet tab at the bottom of the workbook.  Clear the existing data from the table to create your projects and tasks.

Add Multiple Projects in Excel Template

Go to Projects Summary Sheet at the bottom of the workbook.

Clear the existing sample projects in the second column from the column B range B4 to range B 13  under the name Projects.

Enter your Project Tiles in Column B from the range B4. You can enter as many projects as you want.

Click on Project Plan Sheet at the bottom of the workbook. The Project Plan sheet is the main sheet of the template that shows overall tasks and project metrics and status report. In this sheet, you can view all the projects on the Dashboard and Gantt Chart.

Click on down arrow beside  All Projects menu at the top of the sheet. Select your first project from the drop-down menu.

Enter the details of your first project like project name, customer name, and project manager.

Once done, click on the down arrow beside the All Projects menu at the top of the sheet.

Now select your second project from the drop-down menu to open a new version of the sheet.

Enter the details of your second project like project name, customer name, and project manager.

Once done, you can keep on adding new projects and its details as much as you want by repeating the above steps.

Add new tasks in Data Sheet

Data Sheet is the sheet in your workbook that allows you to add the ongoing project activities and their details in an organized way. Data Sheet contains fields that allow you to enter tasks for each of your projects and their respective project activities to track.  In the datasheet, you can add the task for each project, assign a team member to a particular task, mention the start date and the expected date of completion. Follow the below steps to add new tasks under a project.

Navigate to the Data Sheet tab at the bottom of the workbook.

Under the Project Column,  Select the Project Title.

In the Task column, add a new task

In the responsible column, add the name of a person  to whom the task is assigned

In the Start Date Column, assign the data when the responsible person has to start the task.

Specify the number of days required by a team member or a person to complete the project activity for every task in the Days Required column. This progress data will produce the status of your Project in Dashboard and Gantt.

You can update the progress of the task completed in percentage on a daily basis in a separate column called Progress.

Save the changes.

The changes made to the Data Sheet will appear in Project Plan and Project Summary.

You can view the overall status of the project here and get a chart of the percentage of the project completed, and the percentage of the pending tasks.

That’s all there is to it!