Project management software vs. Excel: What to consider

4 common frustrations when managing projects in Excel

There are very good reasons why Excel is one of the most commonly used tools in the workplace. Spreadsheets are adaptable, versatile, and largely interoperable across organizations. Plus, thanks to the fact that they’re taught at school, they’re also familiar to most of the workforce. 

Yet when it comes to managing projects at scale, spreadsheets will often let you down: 

• Excel might be quite flexible, but setting up basic project management functions is fiddly and time consuming. For instance, if you want to create a project timeline in Excel, you need to build and accurately format a table, insert the details of each milestone, deliverable, and task, then convert it into a bar chart. The result is not visually appealing, nor is it very straightforward to edit if your project plan needs to change.
  Or take the example of task assignment. If you’re using Excel for your project management, you’ll typically add a colleague’s name to your spreadsheet, but you’ll have to email or message that person separately to brief them. Ultimately, you’ll just be multiplying the work you need to do.
• Excel relies on manual data entry and formulas, but there are no in-built guardrails to prevent error. You may have heard the story that a spreadsheet error cost JP Morgan Chase $6 billion. While it’s an extreme case, it’s illustrative. If you’re working on huge spreadsheets, there are probably errors in them — but you have to identify and rectify these manually.
  What’s more, when you’re working on projects, project data — such as deadlines, costs, or resources — often changes. You’ll need to manually update this information if your spreadsheet is to stay accurate. 
• Large Excel spreadsheets just aren’t easy to navigate. Think about all the information you need for a project, from budgets to deadlines to all the tasks and approvals assigned to people. Sure, in Excel, you can include all this information in the same sheet, but it just gets unwieldy. The alternative is that you use separate sheets for your budget, project timeline, and assignees. But that means spreading your critical information across multiple sources, and that often results in confusion. 
• Excel doesn’t have any real automations to make your life easier. Excel won’t notify you or your colleagues if someone has completed a task or if a dependency is delayed. Nor will it automate repetitive tasks or integrate with automations across other tools.
  Admittedly, there are some limited automations in Excel — for instance, it can count empty rows or create and format a table. But these require coding skills, and generally they’re not particularly sophisticated. 

So, while Excel can be a useful tool, it does come with substantial limitations.

Project management software vs. Excel: How dedicated project tools make life easier

Organizations make the shift from Excel to project management software for a simple reason: project management tools are designed to help teams overcome the obstacles they’d face when using spreadsheets. 

So, what can you expect from project management tools that Excel just can’t offer? In the rest of this article, we break down five areas where project management tools outperform Excel:

• Ease of use and customization
• Project planning and assigning tasks
• Visibility and reporting
• Team collaboration
• Automation

To show you what we mean in detail, we’ll use our project management software, Wrike, as an example of how these solutions can work. Our solution is already used by over 20,000 companies, in over 140 countries, including by Siemens, Walmart Canada, Sony Pictures Television, and more. 

1. Ease of use and customization

Most people know how to navigate their way around the basics of a spreadsheet. But that’s more down to how widespread these tools are than their natural intuitiveness or ease of use. In reality, Excel is fiddly, complex, and comes with a fairly steep learning curve. 

Instead, project management tools like Wrike are built to be easy to set up, customize, and use day to day. 

• Intuitively organize your projects, tasks, and resources in a way that makes sense for you. Most project management tools are designed to make it easy for everyone to see the work that needs to be done. However, in the name of ease of use, many will force you into a structure that doesn’t necessarily work for you.
  With Wrike, on the other hand, you can build your projects in a completely custom way. For instance, workflows can be organized so you can easily see how different tasks relate to each other. Plus, colleagues can find the resources they need exactly when they need them. 
• Link your shared workflows to colleagues’ individual task lists in dashboards. The benefits of project management tools are not just for project managers; the right tools can make life easier for your entire organization too.
  For instance, Wrike’s dashboards give every colleague a personalized space where they can track their tasks, manage their priorities, and see what they need to complete on a daily basis. It gives everyone an intuitive and completely customizable view of your shared workflows. 
• Keep all your project information up to date, without the weight of data entry. If you need to update your project’s deadline, it’s as simple as dragging and dropping your timeline to a new date in the calendar. That way, every relevant person will automatically receive a notification.
  Plus, you don’t have to manually update your project status when new information is added. Instead, Wrike will do that for you. For example, if you approve a task, you can tailor your workflow so that the task status automatically updates. 

Nickelodeon, the world’s first entertainment network for kids, was looking for a way to handle its increasingly complex projects and workforce — then it found Wrike. 

“We, as a team, needed to find a solution and redo the way that we worked. We decided to turn our office into a more agile way of doing business,” says Jeff Hartlieb, Project Director at Nickelodeon.

With Wrike, that transformation was easy.

“Wrike came in and provided a very clean, simple user interface and adaptable tools for our business,” says Hartlieb. 

“With the implementation of Wrike, we've been able to bring on more projects with the same amount of people because we’ve been able to be more efficient.”

Wrike provided a system for us that was simple, clean, and easy for everybody to use — which made our work much more efficient.

Jeff Hartlieb, Project Director

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2. Project planning and assigning tasks

In Excel, you’ll need to plan your projects within the rigid structure of cells, columns, rows, and sheets. For smaller teams, this can be adequate. But when you’re handling large projects with lots of moving parts, this structure can get quite restrictive.

Instead, with Wrike, planning your projects, budgets, and resources is effortless — and it’s easy to update your plan as you go too. 

• Integrate project planning with cost and resource management, so you have everything you need in the same place. Visualize all the tasks in your project, who is responsible for them, and how much they’re expected to cost, so you have all the information you need at your fingertips.
• Plan individual projects in the context of your entire portfolio. When using Excel, you’ll need a separate sheet for each individual project. With Wrike’s project portfolio management tools, on the other hand, it’s simple to see how tasks and costs have an impact on other projects too. 
• Assign tasks to colleagues and brief them with a single click. Set up a task in Wrike and simply add a colleague to it. They’ll find everything they need, including the brief, deadlines, and any task dependencies. Compared to adding a name to a spreadsheet and briefing them separately, this saves so much time. 
• Automatically update your plan as the project progresses. Wrike functions as the “single source of truth” for your project. And, as it updates in real time as your projects progress and task statuses change, you’ll never miss a thing.

3. Visibility and reporting

In Excel, you can add columns and rows to a sheet to add additional information to your project. However, if you want anything other than a spreadsheet view, you’ll have to build it yourself. For charts and timelines, for instance, that means wrestling with cell formulas and fiddly formatting.

If you use a tool such as Wrike, however, it’s easy to view and get detailed data into your projects in the way that works best for you.

• Visualize your projects however you and your teams prefer. In Wrike, you can use Kanban boards and Gantt charts, as well as to-do lists, priority lists, and more. 
• Base your decisions on project information that’s delivered in real time. All the project statuses you see on your timeline are truly live, meaning you can trust that you’re making decisions based on the most up-to-date information. 
• Generate beautiful reports based on your project data in seconds. Whether you want to grab quick information about project finances or share an update on your team’s project performance, it’s quick and easy to create and share attractive and clear reports.

Sony Pictures Television is one of TV’s best-known content providers. When the team was looking for a project management software, they faced a major challenge. They needed a tool that was flexible enough to let team members work how they wanted, but that had sophisticated enough reporting to prove their results. 

And so they turned to Wrike. 

“So much of Wrike’s flexible structure allows us to apply our own flavor to it. Many other enterprise-level tools only succeed for six months and then blow up, but we get so much more out of Wrike,” says Cheryl Venable, Senior Manager of Operations for the Creative Center.

The different views are super helpful. We use the Gantt chart to understand all of our overlapping projects and timelines. It’s really valuable to understand the full scope of work happening against a calendar view.

Nicki Batelli, Vice President of Operations and Production

4. Team collaboration

While Excel has made efforts to become more collaborative in recent years, that’s ultimately just not what it’s built for. If you want to discuss a project with a team member, you’ll need to do it through another channel. The result is that valuable comments can get separated from the work that you’re actually doing. 

Instead, Wrike puts collaboration tools at the heart of its project management functionality. 

• Keep project information, store resources, and track progress updates all in the same place. You can store your resources, talk about tasks, and actually do work all within Wrike. It means that you’ll never struggle to find what you need to get work done again. 
• Communicate where you do your work, so you can work and chat in the same window. Wrike integrates with messaging tools like Slack, email platforms such as Outlook, and video chat services such as Zoom. Plus, you can comment on assets, request approvals, and directly edit other people’s work all within the software.
• Integrate with over 400 workplace tools, so you don’t need to switch between apps. For instance, Wrike integrates with invoicing software, your CRM, BI tools for data analysis, and many more. Plus, even if there’s not a native integration, you can easily integrate another tool with Wrike via our API.

5. Automation 

Excel’s automations are limited, code-heavy, and simply not very useful. If you want to drive efficiency within your project management processes, it’s best to look elsewhere.

At Wrike, we’ve built our platform to have some of the most powerful automations on the market. 

• Automate repetitive tasks across your workflows with no-code automations. Unlike with Excel, Wrike’s automations don’t require any code. Instead, they use simple rule-based logic to make saving time on manual tasks as easy as possible. You can use automation templates or build your own automated workflows.
• Run automations across your integrations. While Excel can automate some simple tasks within Excel, Wrike offers opportunities for automation across other workplace tools you’re using. For instance, you can ask Wrike to send a message in Slack a day before a task deadline, or to create an invoice in QuickBooks once a project has been completed. 
• Use AI to find new opportunities for automation. Of course, you may not be able to identify every process you want to automate, all by yourself. That’s one way that Wrike’s AI comes in handy. It tracks your work and monitors the repetitive tasks you complete often, then suggests these opportunities for automation. 

Electrolux, a manufacturer of kitchen appliances, needed a better way to manage its design projects. 

“We were getting info in emails, PowerPoints, chat functions, meetings, Excel files, and on Post-its. We just felt the whole process was very ineffective,” Global Packaging Manager Ella Rudebeck explains. 

When using Wrike, the team at Electrolux loved the workflow automation that let them build customized request forms. The results have been impressive, as they now spend 30% less time per project. 

“We have decreased the amount of emails sent to each other because we’re communicating via Wrike now. It’s fewer emails between everyone, and at least 50% fewer emails for designers,” adds Ella.

Overall, the functions of Wrike are helping our team. It’s such an easy and efficient tool for us.

Johan Alm, Design Coordinator

Wrike’s project management software vs. Excel: The final word.

In this guide, we’ve shown you how project management software compares to Excel. While Excel can be a useful solution if you’re in a small team or you work on simple or infrequent projects, dedicated software is a much more reliable solution for scaling organizations. 

There can only be one winner for complex projects. When it comes to project management software, for automation, customization, and visibility, Wrike leads the pack.

Book a demo to find out more about how it works.

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