Calendars can’t predict the future, but they sure as heck keep you from running into a bunch of unnecessary dead ends. Here on this page, we’ve built a calendar template to help the project management team deal with those pesky questions you have all of the time.
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular spreadsheet applications used by business professionals all over the world. It offers a wide range of features that can be very helpful in data analysis and planning.One of the most important aspects of using Excel is its ability to interact with other software programs. This means that you can easily transfer data between Excel and other programs, which can be very useful when working with complex data sets.Another great feature of Excel is its ability to create graphs and charts. This makes it perfect for analyzing data in a visual way, which can help you understand it better.Overall, Microsoft Excel is a powerful tool that can be very helpful in data analysis and planning. If you’re interested in learning more about this application, or if you need help using it, be sure to check out the Microsoft Excel website!
Use It for this project management need: Creating simple schedules and agendas
Excel is familiar and accessible, which means that many project teams still rely on it for a variety of project management tasks.
However, it’s when project teams try to use Excel as a complex scheduling calendar or project management platform that various pitfalls become apparent.
Creating a calendar in Excel will require a lot of manual work upfront — which could be completely avoided with a tool that was specifically designed for calendar management.
Additionally, the incredibly limited mobile versions of Excel or a Google Sheet means that they can never truly be called a project calendar app.
Why burden your team members by keeping up with Excel?
What software engineer wants to update Excel? What designer wants to update Excel?
The hard truth about Excel is that project managers prefer Excel because it’s familiar. This gets passed on to their employees who then feel like they must work in Excel, too.
Google Calendar
Google Calendar is a free online calendar that allows users to manage their schedules and events with ease. With Google Calendar, you can easily create and add events, set reminders, view your schedule in a variety of ways, and more.If you’re new to Google Calendar, we recommend checking out our beginner’s guide to using Google Calendar. Once you’ve got the basics down, take a look at some of our favorite features: • Adding an event: To add an event to your calendar, just type in the date and time information. You can also add location information and other details if you like. • Viewing your schedule: You can see your entire schedule on one page or split it up by day or week. • Managing your reminders: You can set reminders for individual events or all of your events at once. • Adding notes: If you want to include additional information with an event, like directions or comments, you can do that too!
If you already use Google Calendar to manage your meetings and appointments with your work team, then you may be tempted to turn it into a team calendar for your projects.
No wonder it’s one of the most widely used Google apps!
Google Calendar allows for easy calendar availability sharing, which makes it a great choice for things like scheduling kickoff meetings or dropping important milestones (like a project go-live date) on everyone’s calendars.
This tool’s customizable event notifications also mean that users can be reminded of those upcoming meetings or commitments.
Scheduling a quick meeting or checking someone’s availability is easy. But Google Calendar isn’t a project management or task management platform, which means it lacks a lot in terms of project scheduling.
This tool doesn’t offer an easy way to keep project details, attachments, or other important information directly in the calendar — meaning Google Calendar often needs to be used along with another project management tool.
Additionally, managing tasks and deadlines can become challenging and cumbersome. There’s no easy way to display dependencies or tie tasks to each other, which means a lot of manual updating is required when the schedule changes or the scope of the project shifts.
Google Calendar has no great way to link project tasks and projects together. They can only show you what’s due. Moreover, you can’t drill down into any task specifics.
It’s also challenging to keep track of project details, attachments, and to-do lists in Google calendar.
That’s why Google project management isn’t really an option for serious collaborators.
Wrike Calendars
Wrike is a popular online calendar tool that allows users to create and manage events with ease. With Wrike, you can create and edit your events quickly and easily, making it the perfect choice for busy professionals. In addition to its easy-to-use interface, Wrike also offers a variety of features that will make organizing your life easier. Some of these features include:-A wide range of event types to choose from including meetings, tasks, and appointments.-Advanced scheduling capabilities that allow you to customize your event timing and duration.- custom fields that can be added to each event to capture specific information.-Email notification options that allow you to stay updated on important dates and events even if you’re not at your computer.-The ability to share events with friends and family members via email or social media.If you’re looking for an easy way to manage your schedule and keep track of all the upcoming events in your life, then Wrike is the perfect tool for you!
Use it for this project management need: Overseeing entire projects, including tasks, deadlines, and dependencies
Wrike Calendars address many of the pain points that tools like Excel or Google Calendar don’t.
For starters, it can be overwhelming to look at everything a specific team is working on in a single scheduling calendar. Maybe you only want to see what the marketing team has in the works for that upcoming webinar (and not eBooks, blog posts, case studies, and other current projects on their plate).
Wrike Calendars allows you to create different calendars based on project type. These are color-coded and can easily be viewed individually or layered on top of one another. Gone are the days of going cross-eyed trying to figure out what dates and deadlines are pertinent to a specific project.
Wrike Calendars are more than just schedules and due dates. They’re connected to underlying Wrike projects and tasks. This means that you can get the big-picture view from looking at the calendar, but you also have the option to drill down to specific tasks, milestones, and important context — directly from the calendar.
You know that transparency is key, which means you need to keep many different teams and stakeholders in the loop. For that reason, Wrike Calendars are easy to share across internal teams. External links also remain updated so that you can keep vendors, clients, and other outside parties updated on your project progress.
Calendly
Use it for this project management need: Painlessly finding suitable times for meetings and appointments
Aside from your overall project calendar and team-wide schedules, you still have individual calendars to concern yourself with. Maybe you need to schedule a time to sit down with a web developer on your team or to chat with a vendor.
People aren’t always great about blocking times or recording everything on their own calendar, which makes it challenging to know when they’re actually available to connect.
You can skip all of the back and forth emails and scheduling headaches with a free scheduling app like Calendly. Using this calendar tool, you can set your availability and then generate a calendar that displays only your available times.
Calendly will create a link to your scheduling calendar that you can share with others, who can then immediately book meetings times — without having to confirm whether or not that time actually works for you.
That means you can spend less time scheduling meetings and more time actually preparing to have a productive conversation.
Instagantt
If you want online Gantt software, this is the way to go. It’s designed to work with Asana (which we’ll talk about in a moment) and also allows you to link schedules from other sources. That means you only have to put in all of your information once, and you’ll be able to see it across each of your different platforms. You can set up timelines and tasks as well as managing and monitoring your teams’ workload. While you’re at it, you’ll be able to see everything in a format that works for you and your team.
If you’re not using Asana, you can still get a lot out of this system, including monitoring and assigning tasks, assigning due dates, and evaluating progress. All of these things come in several different price points that will help you work with the team that you have and keep apprised of everything that needs to be done.
Some of Instagantt’s awesome features are:
- Gantt and workload view
- Task and subtasks
- Public snapshot sharing options
- Timelines
- Multiple projects and workspaces
- Dependencies and milestones
- Critical path
- Team collaboration options: notification and task assignment
- Estimated and actual cost
- Custom view and custom fields
- Custom color options for progress bars
- Risk and priority
- Baselines
- Drag & drop
- Diverse exporting options: Excel, image and PDF
Microsoft Project
Microsoft Project was a pioneer in the project management field, inspiring a new generation of project management software.
So it’s pretty much a part of the project management lore.
However, none of this compensates for its complicated and primitive calendar options.
For starters, MS Project requires intensive training. Only high-level executives with sufficient experience in the field can use it.
Secondly, you can either purchase its desktop-enabled version or the cloud-based version, but not both at the same time. And even then, it’s quite expensive for freelancing professionals or small businesses.
Check out our list of top Microsoft Project alternatives.
So if Excel is too nerdy, Google Calendar is too basic, and MS Project is too complicated (and expensive), what do you use?
The best project management calendar is right in front of you.
Workato
Use it for this project management need: Automating and streamlining clunky scheduling processes
Alright, you caught us — Workato isn’t actually a calendar tool itself. However, it allows you to connect all sorts of different apps that you use (like Slack, Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, Calendly, and, yes, even Wrike) and then automate common interactions between them. That means you can use it to make various schedule-related tasks faster and far more painless.
For example, you can create a “recipe” (that’s what they call an automated workflow) to automatically create an Outlook Calendar event whenever a new Wrike task is created that includes a start and due date.
Or when you create a new invoice in QuickBooks, you can set up Workato to automatically create a new task in Wrike and a new event in your Google Calendar so you make sure to actually send and follow up on it.
Think of Workato as a perfect complement to whatever calendar management tool you’re using, as it can take a lot of the repetitive tasks and mindless work out of the scheduling process.
Clickup
Use ClickUp’s Resource Management calendar functionality to ensure that you’re always up-to-date about your resource availability when setting up your task workflows.
You can also add Time Estimates to your project timeline so that when you drop them onto the ClickUp Calendar, the time required to complete each task will automatically be accounted for.
It’s super simple to schedule any tasks without deadlines, too.
ClickUp will even show you unscheduled tasks for certain projects and Lists that you can drop right onto the calendar.
Calendars in ClickUp give you a central place for your entire company’s work.
Now you’ll easily know if one department’s party overlaps with another — and you can adjust accordingly.
Or attend multiple parties. The choice is yours!
Conclusion
With a project calendar in place, project team collaboration will be far better than it’s now. most of the calendars for project management are free and some require subscription.
Calender tools for project mangagement is a good way of getting the job done fast. so if you are looking for a good way of getting organised with your team, is best to use a calendar tool to manage all your future projects.