Advantages of MS Project over MS Excel

• MS Project can easily set up project tasks, phases, and milestones. Unlike in MS Excel, the tasks with zero duration will be automatically appeared as mile stones. A mile stone is a key point of a project which is used to monitor the project’s progress. •MS Project can easily define task durations and relationships. MS Project allows you to easily establish task relationships which are also known as dependencies of tasks as sequential, concurrent and overlapping.

Once the task relationship is established with its duration the MS Project automatically calculates the schedule. In MS Excel it is not possible to define dependencies and all the durations, start and end dates should be manually entered to the spreadsheet in order to create task schedule. •Identification and allocation of resources and coordination of the workload in MS Project is clear than MS Excel. MS Project facilitates the users to define costs and resources in a separate view which is inbuilt in MS Project and to manage them by allocating them to tasks in a respective related view which defines task schedule. The user can easily transfer from one view to another by a single mouse click. In MS Excel there is no such built in facility for resource allocation and management so that the user needs to manually enter all the data associated with resources and create graphs separately. •Tracking and analyzing the project schedule. Once a defined schedule has been approved, there is a feature in MS Project that allows to set up a baseline which is used to track the project schedule. After setting up the baseline the Project Manager can then track progress and identify problems using built in tools of MS Project. To set up a baseline by using MS Excel, it requires populating additional baseline columns manually and there is no built in tools or facilities to track the progress of the project. •MS Project creates reports effortlessly. MS Project can create reports instantly where ready to use reports templates are available to user. Tables and filters can be applied to data in order to present most relevant data to different stakeholders. This facility allows Project Managers to be more productive without having to spend an extra time to customize and format data what he/she would need to do using MS Excel. •It is possible to share information easily. MS Project has the ability to export data into MS Excel, MS Outlook, and XML which is a global file type that is support by any Operating System. This makes MS Project data available for any hardware and software platform. There fore a user who don’t have installed MS Project to his/her computer still able to share the information provided by MS Project.