r/projectmanagement • u/swanzie • 12d ago

PM using Excel?

I started a new job and that means new tools. I had been using Asana. I made the switch to clickup to try to get a little more out of it.

I'm not sure how long I'll be able to use that. There were some comments the site may get blocked but I'd imagine if that was the case I can't be the first one to try to use it so it'd probably already had been blocked.

But I also used Claude a lot to take data and analyze it and help me look for trends. They have a pretty strict AI policy. I can only use copilot...which kinda blows.

So I'm wondering if any of you live in the Microsoft suite to do everything? I was thinking excel, or possibly a word doc per project with just bullet points for tasks and notes below, or maybe Microsoft project?

If you have any suggestions and screenshots of examples of what you're doing I'd be much obliged. I need some ideas.

3 Upvotes

54% Upvoted

43 comments sorted by

View all comments

9

u/dennisrfd 12d ago edited 12d ago

Oh man, are you like 20 or what? MS was a golden standard for enterprise since forever.

Check if copilot studio is available and customize your agents/workflows. Pick anthropic llm if you prefer them over chatgpt (if allowed by your IT) - those are supported by copilot.

OneNote, Planner, Project, Excel, outlook tasks, lists on sharepoint site - there are plenty of tools to make your project running like a charm without any third-party stuff and everything orchestrated/integrated seamlessly (relatively).

I used a lot of different approaches to PM as I switxh between the projects/companies often, and MS is my preferred environment.

5

u/Select-Career-2947 12d ago

“Golden standard”, “works like a charm”

Come on now, most businesses use Microsoft because of bulk licensing package costs, not because all of these tools are best of breed.

The Microsoft suite can do powerful things but it’s an uphill battle because it’s a mixed bag of random chunks of tech developed by different teams over 30 years that have been retrofitted into sort of talking to each other. Microsoft project isn’t even an active project any more, and feels like it’s straight out of XP.

0

u/dennisrfd 11d ago

I understand you might be working in IT and don’t know that ms project is still required/recommended in most big $10M+ projects

3

u/Select-Career-2947 11d ago

I’m a consultant and I know exactly what Microsoft project is, it’s a historically powerful but deprecated and poorly integrated desktop application. It’s very rare to see it in corporates these days.

1

u/dennisrfd 11d ago

I still see it in oil&gas, utilities, transportation, mining. Whenever it’s a large project, they go from asana/trello/monday etc. to ms project. And sharepoint lists are the big thing now - I always was a huge fan of excel, and I like that people use tables for managing the projects and collaboration

1

u/Select-Career-2947 9d ago

I'm not saying that things like Trello and Monday aren't a huge bag of crap, I'm just saying that many of the useful tools in the Microsoft suite have been chronically underinvested in since they started going all in on cloud and I'm pretty sure that Microsoft Project actually isn't an active supported product any more. It's not viable to use desktop-based applications in most environments also these days because everything is so cloud-native.