I’ve been involved in a number of projects that were managed by Project Planner, and each time I’ve been extremely satisfied with the results. If you’re like me, you want to make sure that your team is organized and on task, and Project Planner makes it easy to see how far your team has come. The built-in calendar shows you the progress of your project in clear terms, and is especially great for showing how much time has elapsed since the last milestone was completed. There are also all sorts of tools for facilitating collaboration, including discussions, file sharing, and tasks.
Project Planner is a better choice than MS Project for businesses because it is more intuitive and easier to use. Unlike MS Project, Project Planner does not require a lot of time to learn the software. It is great for the everyday user, who needs an easy-to-understand program to create schedules and manage projects. Given that a large portion of the population uses MS Office, it makes sense that Project Planner was created as an add-on to Excel. This makes it easy to learn, because most people already know how to use Excel.
Project Planner is a free web-based project management tool that may be better than Microsoft Project for businesses. As you can see, in Excel you must first select the cells you want to work with before creating a chart or table in Excel. In Project Planner, however, you can begin entering data immediately after clicking on “Create New.” The entry box is directly underneath the title section, which makes it very easy to access. Not only do charts have more options than in Excel (such as being able to choose from several different types of charts), but you can also add filters and grouping options when using them with data from Project Planner.Â
MS Project has been the gold standard for professional project management software for decades. It’s a robust tool that is used by individuals and teams in nearly every industry, and it’s familiar to almost anyone who will read this. Its simple interface makes it easy to use, and its features are appropriate for managing everything from small projects with a handful of people involved all the way up to large-scale operations with teams of hundreds.
That said, as much as I like MS Project as a tool for managing my own projects, I’m not keen on recommending it for businesses. The reason is that its lack of integration with other software makes it hard to share plans with coworkers and partners. Project Planner is a SaaS-based solution that is meant to be used by multiple users across an organization. From the start, it provides the ability to easily invite others into your projects, who can then see what you’re planning on doing and provide their own inputs. It also lets you share specific views of your plan with each participant or stakeholder—you can show them just what they need to know while keeping other information private. Combined with the ability to update a plan in real time (whereas MS Project is only updated as someone exports a new version).
