- [Instructor] So now that we know how to use Excel tables,
let's talk about what types of things we want to track.
Now, you don't want to put everything
in your Project Management table
because there's going to be too much data,
and some things just aren't relevant.
The best part about an Excel table
is that it has a lot of the things that we really want
already built in.
So let me show you.
Go ahead and place your cursor on cell A3.
You're going to type in a 2 here.
The table's going to automatically grow.
So your project ID is a numeric field, and we like that.
We usually want some sort of unique identifier
for each project.
And then under task description,
I want you to type in Project Execution.
And under Assigned To, you can type in your name,
and under the Date, you can put a date like the one above.
So we'll do May 1st, 2024.
And then if you feel like it,
you can put in today's date
or just something that has a sufficient amount of time
after that start date.
And then finally, we can add comments.
Project will be executed.
Ideally, you would do a better job
putting those comments in.
You do something a little bit more specific.
Okay, so if we take a look at what's in this table,
we have categorical data.
That's who it is assigned to.
We have text fields that explains comments.
We have date fields, beginning and end,
very important for a project.
And then we also have numeric fields, like the project ID.
Now, there's a additional type of numeric field
that I want to show you,
and this is really important,
and Tables take care of this for us.
So in cell G1, I want you to type in Days Between.
Like that, and you see it automatically creates
a new column.
And then what we're going to do
is we're going to type in equals in cell G2,
we're going to select End Date.
Note that this pops up with table structure syntax,
that's what this is called.
So you see it's End Date minus Start Date
versus cell references.
And you also note the @ symbol here.
That means at this record.
So when I hit Enter,
it's just going to do that for each record.
And you can see that it made a little lightning bolt here
to let us know that it did that.
So that's the type of information we want to store on a table.
And in particular,
we are going to use these calculated columns a lot
to come up with our different metrics
to understand how our projects are going.
Now, before I move on,
I just want to give a very simple discussion
about going down versus going long.
So what does that mean?
Right now, our table is building down.
So we have a project ID here that says 1 or 2,
but in a certain sense,
we define the project scope,
and then project execution is next.
So, in this case,
both of these are actually referring
to projects that are part of a bigger plan.
So you do one sequentially after another.
Some people might consider that
all part of the same project, right?
So in this case,
the data that we're working with is going down, right?
So even though these are referring
to steps in a larger project
and are themselves smaller projects,
the way we understand that
is that each project gets its own line.
So that's one way to do this work.
Another way is to go long,
in which case you have one project
and then each one of these steps is defined as a column.
Now, which one is better?
In general, going down is better,
and then you would add some sort of other unique identifier
just to indicate that it was part of the same project.
Going long is just a lot harder
because if you wanted to understand the start dates overall
and you wanted to analyze them,
you'd have to analyze two different columns.
Whereas when you go down,
you only have to analyze one column.
In some instances, it'll just make more sense to go long.
But for the rest of this course,
we're generally going to go down
as we add more projects to our table.
Well, now that we know how to identify project metadata
and to track it,
in our next video,
we're going to talk about how to identify risks and trends.
I'll see you there.