After a successful plan is laid out, only then can execution begin. An effective project plan involves the definition of scope and a feasibility study. Remove from Timeline will remove the task.The project plan in excel is the most critical part of project management. (We have used Callout for Milestones in our example). You can display the task as Callout as well. Selecting the Display as Bar option will display the task as a rectangular block. Right clicking on the task bar will also give options to Display as Bar, Display as Callout, Remove from Timeline options.

You can change color and font of the task bar by right clicking and selecting the font and other formatting options. You can now apply the above formatting changes to all the projects in the plan. Associating a color with each project makes it very informative and easy to read.

For major milestones use the ' Display As Callout' option by right clicking on the task block.Īfter doing the formatting changes the timeline should look similar to the below.

Remove any small tasks as they might clutter the view.

Use the additional formatting options to make sure the date and other text vales are clearly visible.

For IT Projects this would be resemble SDLC.

Move and re-order( by dragging blocks up or down) the task blocks to arrange in a more logical order.

( Right Click on the task block to change the color).

Select a color for each of the projects you want to show on the timeline.

No one would like to see such a timeline.įollow the below formatting to make it more attractive.

Frankly speaking this view is very cumbersome and does not give the reader any idea about the project phases or tasks. #2 : Making it attractive and easy to readĪfter you have added all the task for the projects the timeline will look like below. You can view the project timeline by clicking on View Tab and then checking the Timeline check box. You can add a task to the timeline by right clicking on the task and selecting the Add To Timeline option. You can choose to use a single project plan with multiple projects or you can use a Master Project Plan. To see how we can use this feature from MS Project we will use a Project Plan with 4 sub projects - Alpha, Project Beta, Gamma and Whiskey. MS Project has the Timeline view which with small minor customization can be used to generate an amazing project view which can allow anyone to understand what all projects and related tasks are in progress.

Ms project timeline example