While that might be good for that purpose, I think that it also means that people don’t tend to dive deeper into all the abilities of Project. I also think that, in the case of Excel, people get comfortable over time because they understand how it works so they just keep using it for “everything” – whether for scheduling, data reporting (instead of Access or SQL or something) or for any of a myriad of uses that Excel isn’t originally intended to do.

Here at Chronicle Graphics, we find a lot of people who use Excel as a substitute for Microsoft Project. In fact, there are so many people out there managing projects in Excel, that we released an Excel edition of our OnePager timeline/Gantt chart software specifically for these users a few years ago. Prior to that, OnePager had only created Gantt charts from Microsoft Project.

Excel can be useful for keeping track of rough project schedules, but we do find that once cost, resourcing, and other PMBOK elements come into play, Project definitely begins to serve its purpose, and PMs start to make the switch.

My question is how many people are using Project as it’s intended versus only scratching the surface of its features, and therefore not seeing significant differences from Excel.