Tool comparison

Linetrack vs. Excel
in project planning

Excel is by far the most common predecessor of a project planning system – and for part of the work it remains the better tool. The break does not happen when you draw a bar, it happens in daily operation: as soon as several departments have to maintain the same plan and several projects compete for the same people.

Linetrack as project planning software compared with planning files in Excel

In short

Excel remains the right choice for a single, manageable project with exactly one owner; Linetrack is built for planning across departments and projects. The difference shows in day-to-day operation: an Excel file has exactly one owner, which is why copies and versions appear. Linetrack puts schedules and capacity on one shared data foundation where every department maintains its own share. Of more than 400 replaced planning tools, most were Excel spreadsheets.

400+

Excel spreadsheets and
planning tools replaced

91 %

named Excel and tool sprawl
as their starting problem

1512+

industrial projects
managed in parallel

10 days

median to the first
self-planned project

*Every figure on this page comes from a full survey of all live Linetrack implementations, as of August 2026. Multiple answers were possible for the starting problems.

Starting point

What Excel was built for – and where it breaks in industrial projects

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application: a grid of cells that calculates, sorts, filters and analyses. It is excellent at exactly that, which is why it sits on practically every desk. A schedule emerges in it as a by-product – a start column, an end column, conditional formatting, done. That is not misuse of the tool, it is the obvious first step.

The breaking point is not drawing the plan, it is running it. An Excel file has exactly one owner: it lives in one place, one person maintains it, and write access is exclusive when it matters. As soon as several departments are supposed to work in it, you get copies, competing versions and e-mail attachments with a date in the file name. On top of that come the things a spreadsheet structurally does not know: Excel does not calculate task relationships, has no concept of departmental capacity, and keeps every project in its own file. How that plays out specifically in the bar chart is covered on the Gantt planning page; this comparison looks at the tool as a whole.

In practice

Where the Excel plan breaks once departments and projects are added

As long as one person plans one project, the file holds up. Five points describe what happens once a second department and a second project come into play. Co-authoring in Microsoft 365 changes less than you would expect: it solves simultaneous access, not the structure behind it – a spreadsheet knows cells and sheets, but no roles per area of responsibility and no departmental capacity.

A file has exactly one owner. It sits in one directory, one person maintains it, and anyone who wants to change something needs access to the whole thing. The easiest way out is a copy – and from that moment the plan exists twice.
Copies turn into competing versions. The current state travels through the company as an e-mail attachment with a date in the file name. In the meeting, the first question is which file counts, and only the second is which date counts.
Permissions apply to the file, not to your own share of it. Engineering should be able to maintain its own tasks without changing the assembly schedule. A spreadsheet cannot separate the two: either someone may edit the file or they may not. Roles per area of responsibility are not a spreadsheet concept.
Every project lives in a file of its own. A department's capacity, however, only emerges from all projects taken together. The question of who is overbooked in March therefore sits between the files rather than in any one of them – answering it means copying data together, and doing so again every time.
The file becomes an application nobody can take over. Over the years, links, macros and nested formulas accumulate. What emerges is software without documentation and without tests – and it depends on the person who built it. On average, Linetrack replaces several such planning tools and data silos per customer at once.

The question sits between the files

Point four by example: three projects, three files, the same department in the same month. Each file on its own looks unremarkable.

Project-A.xlsxEngineering, March45 %Project-A.xlsx: 45% of engineering capacity in March.
Project-B.xlsxEngineering, March40 %Project-B.xlsx: 40% of engineering capacity in March.
Project-C.xlsxEngineering, March30 %Project-C.xlsx: 30% of engineering capacity in March.

Total across all three files115 % over capacity

None of the three files shows a bottleneck. The overbooking only appears in the total — and that row exists in no spreadsheet until someone copies it together by hand.

These five points are about operation, not about visualization. If you only want to know why a bar chart in Excel does not hold up as scheduling logic, the detail is on the Gantt planning page. If you are asking the question one level up – which category of software fits at all – the overview is in the software comparison.

Core argument

A spreadsheet or a shared plan

Excel is not a bad planning tool. It is an excellent calculation tool that also gets used for planning, because it is already there and because everyone can operate it. That is exactly why it is the most common predecessor: of more than 400 replaced planning tools, most were Excel spreadsheets.

The dividing line does not run between „can draw bars“ and „cannot“. It runs between a document owned by one person and a data foundation that several areas of responsibility work on at the same time. 91 % of customers named Excel and tool sprawl as their starting problem.

The test is simple: move one task two weeks later. In a spreadsheet, a date changes. In a shared plan, the linked successor tasks move with it, the hours shift in the capacity histogram of the affected department, and the project next door that had booked the same design engineer for the same period shows the conflict.

What Linetrack deliberately does not do is replan automatically. The software calculates the shift through the chain and shows the consequence – the decision is made by people who know the customer, the machine and the commitment. How schedules and capacity connect is described on the scheduling and capacity planning page.

In comparison

Microsoft Excel
versus Linetrack

The comparison is not about feature count – taken as a whole, Excel calculates more than any planning system. It is about seven points where project planning is decided in day-to-day operation.

Aspect	Microsoft Excel
Data ownership and access	One file, one owner, and copies and versions from there	One data foundation, roles and rights per area of responsibility
Task relationships	Maintained as date values, with no scheduling logic behind them	Linked – a shift ripples through the chain
Departmental capacity	Not provided for, a separate list or an educated guess	Capacity histogram below the bar chart, across all projects
Several projects at once	One file per project	All projects on one shared data foundation
Feedback from the departments	Phone calls, e-mail, status requests, typed in by hand	Task tracking via desktop and mobile app
Plan vs. actual and forecast	Export, pivot table, manual reconciliation	Actuals feed into the same plan, forecast inside the system
Free-form ad-hoc calculation	A strength: any formula, instantly, with no model boundaries	Bound to the planning model, free analysis via export

The last row belongs to an honest assessment: if you want to calculate freely, you are faster in Excel than in any planning system, and Linetrack does not change that. The difference lies in where the binding schedule sits and who maintains it. That is what collaborative project management is about: departments maintain their own share instead of reporting it. Suppliers join the same schedule as actors in their own right, on a free collaboration licence.

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Multi-tier backups

Hourly, daily, and monthly backups with a typical recovery time of under one hour.

Honest assessment

When Excel stays the right choice

Excel is an excellent tool, and for part of the work in a project it remains the best one. Four cases in which switching gains you nothing:

One-off ad-hoc analyses and calculations. A quotation calculation, a cost comparison, an analysis needed exactly once: a spreadsheet is the fastest tool available for that. Opening a planning system instead would be the detour.
A single, manageable project with exactly one owner. When the same person plans, maintains and decides, there is no coordination loss for a system to absorb. The file is not a compromise then, it is the right size.
Preparing data and exporting it for reports. Merging figures, reshaping them, putting them into a reporting format: companies running Linetrack still export to Excel for that. It is not a step backwards, it is the division of labour between a planning system and a spreadsheet.
Quick what-if calculations outside the scheduling logic. In-house production versus outsourcing, hourly rates, quantity structures: such calculations need no task relationships, they need freedom in the formulas. Excel is faster there.

Scheduling and resource planning in Linetrack across several departments and projects

Switching only pays off once several departments have to maintain the same plan or several projects compete for the same people. Until then the Excel file is not a problem but a solution with proportionate effort. From that point on, the question moves from visualization to organization – and therefore to multi-project management.

Switching over

How the switch away from Excel works

The Excel import is not a custom development but a finished standard function and part of the product – with no extra effort. Project and task lists with dates and hour values are read in directly. The existing planning is taken over instead of being retyped.

That removes the most common argument against switching: nobody has to retype planning files that have grown over years. The same applies to schedules from MS Project and Primavera as well as master data from SAP – the overview is on the interfaces and integrations page.

Project and task lists taken over from Excel in the Linetrack work breakdown structure

What matters afterwards is not the import but the first plan of your own. The median time between kick-off and the first self-planned project is ten working days, regardless of company size. The process behind that is described on the implementation page; what planning looks like afterwards in mechanical and plant engineering is shown on the industry page. What such a switch looks like in practice for a machine builder is shown by the MSG Solutions case study – the old project management tool was fully replaced there.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Still have questions?

Book a meeting with our team.

Is Excel suitable for project planning?

For a single, manageable project with exactly one owner, yes. For ad-hoc calculations, data preparation and free-form what-if analysis, Excel is even the faster tool. The limit shows in operation: Excel does not calculate task relationships, has no concept of departmental capacity, and keeps every project in its own file with exactly one owner.

When should you move from Excel to project planning software?

Once several departments have to maintain the same plan, or several projects compete for the same people. Both produce copies and competing versions in a file, because a spreadsheet knows no roles per area of responsibility and no cross-project capacity. As long as one person plans and decides, there is no reason to switch. From the second parallel project onwards it becomes a question of multi-project management.

What can Linetrack do that Excel cannot?

Three things that are structurally missing from a spreadsheet: task relationships that take effect through the chain when something moves; a capacity histogram directly below the bar chart showing a department's workload across all projects; and roles and rights that let every department maintain its own share in the same plan. Added to that are progress feedback via task tracking, scenarios before the decision, and suppliers as actors in their own right in the schedule.

Can existing Excel plans be moved into Linetrack?

Yes. The Excel import is a finished standard function and part of the product, so no separate interface development is needed. Project and task lists with dates and hour values are read in directly, and the existing planning is taken over instead of being retyped. The same applies to schedules from MS Project and Primavera as well as master data from SAP – an overview of all connections is on the interfaces and integrations page.

How long does the switch from Excel to Linetrack take?

The median time between kick-off and the first self-planned project is ten working days, regardless of company size. Importing the existing plans is not the bottleneck, because it runs as a standard function. What takes time is agreeing how deep the planning should go and which department maintains which share. The full process is described on the implementation page.

What does Linetrack cost compared with an Excel solution?

A direct price comparison is misleading, because Excel is usually already covered by an existing office licence. Linetrack starts at 10 € per user and month, modular by number of users, roles and the functional modules booked. A planning simulation before the decision is free of charge, and suppliers receive a free collaboration licence. The platform runs in ISO 27001 certified data centres in Germany. What the switch means for your planning is something we clarify in a first conversation.

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