Excel, known as the popular tool for project management in many domains. It includes many useful basis features from time tracking, to-do list, timeline, financial management, gantt chart, to strong analysis and presentation tools like pivot table and diversify of charts and graphs, 3D maps. Plus, by installing Microsoft Office, Excel is included with other supportive tools like Word and PowerPoint, this seems the less expensive solution that everyone prefer to use, no extra pay, and no time-consuming for training.
However, when it comes to manage construction projects, these are top 5 reasons why Excel is not the best tool.
1 - Manual process
Excel is a manual process, even though with available templates. Manual update is time-consuming, increase mistakes, which can lead to significant loss of productivity hours.
2 - Ineffective collaboration
When you need to effectively communicate with your team members and external parties, Excel will show massive limitations. All the collaborations, information sharing, notifications and so on need to be conducted by other tools including email, phone, chat apps, cloud service like Google Drive or Dropbox … Therefore, you need a project management platform that can handle all of this for you.
3 - Poor management
It is difficult to set up documents authorizations, including the right to edit, read and approve, and prioritize tasks. Furthermore, it doesn't help to reduce repetitive tasks, one of the pain points in managing construction project.
4 - No mobility
It is not a pleasure to check and update Excel files on mobile devices. Imagine how difficult to open a giant file and tracking the information on tiny columns.
5 - Lack of specialized features to elevate productivity
Real-time update
Task assignment
Reminder system
Documents history
Project status
Tasks and questions
Safe documents storage
In short, Excel can be useful for small projects but not for any type of construction project, those require an effective coordination between project managing individuals and parties.
Goplan platform with its features all in one place basically can mostly solve Excel's limitations and especially help project managers unleash their full potential with many more advance features.
If you have other opinions, please leave them in the comment. We love to discuss this.