Purpose

As a scheduler, many times you want to send look-aheads or other schedule information out to the team, but the formatting of the excel file looks horrific. There's no "colored banding" for the WBS structure, and the team complains "this is really hard to read". You end up spending hours formatting look-aheads that will look pretty, instead of focusing on the things that are important in life; playing pickle ball.

Here's a tool that will automatically format your excel file to include pretty colored banding on each WBS header. Feel free to download the template file and enjoy for yourself so that you can free up some time for your next pickle ball game!

How to Use

Let's say we have the following activities in P6, and we want to copy this list to P6 and have the WBS bands colored.

Simply highlight all of the activities from P6 (Including the headers), copy them as below:

And paste them into cell B1 under Sheet1 of the template.

After the data is pasted, you'll notice that the WBS bands are auto-colored.

KAPOW!!!

Special Notes

Just a few things to know about the template

• I included a separate tab for "Instructions" to remind me how to use the tool if I ever become a professional pickle ball player for an extended period of time and leave the industry, only to return and have to pick up where I left off. Before I distribute the file, I always delete that sheet prior to sending out.
• Make sure you have the activity ID in the first column, and the activity description in the second column. This is necessary because the conditional formatting is based on the number of spaces that precede the activity ID and whether or not the activity name is blank or not.

Happy scheduling! Hope you enjoy! Feel free to leave a comment and let me know how the tool is working out for you.