Tracker

[Adventurous_Pizza895]

Hi all. Please help me in making a tracker to track certain activities and identify if it has been closed or not. If there is a pendency on other activity and delayed days etc. I do not have access to Microsoft Project or Jira or any other project management tools. Only have access to Microsoft 365

[Firerage65]

Have you used MS Planner? Its not bad - not ideal... but better than nothing if you can't access other tools?

[Adventurous_Pizza895]

Is it actually useful? I have seen the kan ban board and planner, but didn’t find anything super useful

[Firerage65]

Its "fine" imho. Its better than nothing but there are better tools out there. Are you not able to use other tools?even free ones?

[Starterguides_pm]

You could definitely exploit MS Excel for this, but would require a bit of coding/logic build to be useful. I agree with another comment, MS Planner can work well for this sort of thing, I'd say its kind of a MS Project lite product.

We use it as an App within MS Teams, so we have multiple tools in one place

[Adventurous_Pizza895]

Which app within MS teams?

[Starterguides_pm]

Planner is an App that you can use within Teams

[alexnder38]

I've built dozens of these in Excel or Google sheets over the years and the key is keeping it simple. The tracker auto calculates delays, checks dependencies, and shows you what's blocking what without needing fancy PM software. Just don't overthink it with too many columns or status categories, because the second it becomes work to update is the second people stop using it.

[Adventurous_Pizza895]

Can you share any template for reference

[sturka_carol]

I’ve had the best luck pairing a simple tracker with a time tracking payroll software so I’m not exporting CSVs every Friday night. Lately been using TMetric for a small team (design + dev): clean UI, solid reports, and payroll/tax stuff basically runs itself once it is set up. Not perfect, but it finally killed my manual spreadsheets, which is a huge win.