Why use Project Management (PM) tools?

At some workplaces, applications such as Microsoft Excel are used for task tracking and PM! Spreadsheets are not really meant for this. Users find Excel easy to use, as they can control every cell, and there is nothing ‘behind the scenes’ for them to understand. However, computing duration, starting and ending dates manually for each task is a sheer waste of time. And even when done, there is no alert when your plan is flawed.

One of the fundamental problems of planning a project in a spreadsheet is that you never know when an engineer (or task owner) is overloaded or not available (vacation). Planning a project without considering the holidays and vacation of individual task owners only leads to trouble, right from the beginning.

PM tools have a lot of advantages when it comes to project planning and tracking. They allow you to get an overview of the project visually, by presenting the schedule as a Gantt chart. This clearly shows the duration of a task,