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Excel pro forma template for Product Management

if you've ever managed a project you've probably received in your opinion stupid questions from colleagues they could have easily found the answer to in your shared project spreadsheet if you are one of those colleagues you probably ask those definitely not stupid questions because the spreadsheet was badly organized and difficult to navigate in this video I'll go through 10 best practices for project management spreadsheets designed to be shared with others and can even download my Google Sheets template to follow along let's get started hi friends welcome back to channel if you're new here my name is Jeff come for the career tips and stay for the not so stupid best practices there are a lot of things going on here so I first go through tips you can use within tabs then take a step back and recommend best practices on how to structure the overall spreadsheet tip number one no matter how self-explanatory the content is always include a sentence or two in the top left hand corner explaining what the tab contains one's a spreadsheet is shared with other teams you don't know who might come across it the way I I think about it is if a new hire who joined yesterday opens up the spreadsheet this tab or even this one will they be able to understand what's going on here without having to message me so no matter how obvious it may seem to you the project manager always include a note explaining what's in the tab or instructions if other people are supposed to input information on that note tip number two if there's a deadline for when action needs to be taken make it large and obvious like this or like this the nice reason being user friendliness the honest reason being if a salesperson miss a deadline and complain they didn't know you can just point to this and call them stupid just kidding don't do that call them illiterate instead nah I don't do that either no but seriously shared spreadsheet tip number three hyperlink to specific tabs if you click on the shared button here and add people by default they'll actually land on the first tab when they click into the document what most people don't know is that different tabs have unique URLs so if you want to make sure someone lands on a specific tab you can copy and paste this URL and Grant them edit access protip within a spreadsheet if you hyperlink another tabs URL command C to copy and then command or control K to hyperlink like so you can actually just jump to that tab directly without having to open up a new window or something super professional especially formatting tip number four for tables where you want to be crystal clear on how it should be filled out it's smart to include an explanations row usually in a light gray italicized and in Brackets right below the header for example for this column if you don't input your full Corporate email you're not going to have access to the live stream link when I have particularly low faith in another team sales um I include an example Row in light orange so there's no way they can screw up right by the way I'm kidding with these jokes I used to be account manager in the sales team I drove my marketing teammates crazy so I have the right to make fun of my previous self since I graduated from being dumb okay I gotta stop the sales team is gonna kill me especially best practice number five data validation is your best friend for those of us not familiar here's a simple example in this status column I just want three input possibilities so I highlight the entire column data data validation list from of items uh not started comma WIP for work in progress comma and done for completed Pro tip click reject input and press save now it is physically impossible for anyone to make a typo or error in this column if I try to type in completed instead of done it will not let me do that Jeff you're just a control freak it doesn't really matter the thing is if another formula is dependent on the value of these cells here perfect accuracy makes a huge impact and will save you from troubleshooting headaches down the line but yes I am a control freak speaking of perfect Pro tip I like to add conditional formatting to status columns so with this column highlighted format conditional formatting format cells text is exactly done and make that green add another rule text is exactly WIP work in progress and make that yellow now it's uh nice and tidy oh Pro tip number two for data validation it's always smart to add a catch-all option if you're worried about missing something for example here I'm fairly certain in data validation there are only four teams involved right but I've added another option just in case shared spreadsheet tip number six use formulas whenever possible but avoid fixed numbers within formulas in this very simple calculations tab we want to forecast three possible scenarios ad spend increase of 20 30 and 40 one way to do this is to obviously equal this number times 1.2 repeat this but obviously this is very manual and seductible to human error a better way is to actually change the headers to the percentages directly like show equal this number function F4 three times to lock the column C multiply by 1 plus this percentage up here function F4 twice to lock the fifth row close bracket enter and highlight this command R command and control R to drag all the way to the right and special shout out to my colleague Henry who taught me this trick Slash stolar from Reddit if you just double click the small square here you can actually bring the formulas all the way down without having to drag them by the way if you want more practical productivity tips I steal from Reddit and or my colleagues sign up for my Note productivity ping newsletter link down below best practice number seven for spreadsheets import data without messing with the raw input so for this very realistic Google forms the responses are shown in this spreadsheet here I don't recommend manipulating the data in this spreadsheet in this tab because you might mess up the raw data instead use the import range function I talk about this in my Google Sheets functions video check that out to import the data over and highlight in some way that there's an import range function in this cell because if someone overrides Us by mistake the entire thing breaks down now let's move on to the overall spreadsheet structure tips to start off you probably already noticed but I have these empty tabs here key info working tabs raw data that acts as visual separators and I combine these with a simple color code it's a very small thing but imagine you're in a video conference there are a lot of tabs and instead of saying go to the whitelist tab you can say the whitelist tab is in the green section special structure best practice number eight is to highlight key information up front again what do you think about this is if I had to show my manager the most important information about this project in five minutes what would I prioritize in this oversimplified example since this is an event the number of signups in real time and the topics to be shared are probably top of mind for more complex projects and spreadsheets it's good to have a readme first tab that clearly shows the project owner and breaks down instructions definitions and shares links to relevant files tip number nine always have a separate section for raw data and even better protect these tabs so only the core working group can make edits you can do this by right-click protect sheet you can enter description it's optional and set permissions and select people who can actually make edits and click done best practice number 10 is more of a communication tip because a perfect spreadsheet is useless if other teammates can't easily access it or don't even know where to find it so doing team meetings you want to present the spreadsheet as you talk about the project to let everyone know it exists and in follow-up emails and team meeting notes always hyperlink the spreadsheet with the appropriate URL if you don't know what I'm talking about highly recommend you check out my video on how to take productive team notes at work see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one