Projects often start in Excel for good reason - if they're small, have few resources, and do not need a more complex system. Sooner or later, hopefully as you rise in the management ranks to project manager, you will need a more flexible system designed solely with project management in mind, rather than using a spreadsheet program. There is, of course, nothing wrong with using Excel to manage a small project, but using a dedicated program will make it much easier as the size and complexity of your work demands increase.

If you're already using Excel to manage projects, using Project is not a big a leap as just picking it up and starting from scratch. There are a few handy ways to make the migration quickly and painlessly. Much of the "work" you will have to do will depend on the kind of projects you've been using Excel for. Short, repeated projects will probably be easier to move to a new system, but long, complex, one-offs won't.

The first step to thinking about the migration is how you've been setting out your data in Excel. The names of your columns and rows may well be useable 'units' that can be moved in to Project. Tasks, staff names, deadlines, and the budget are all good examples. Dates are particularly important as Project will use these to move your resources around (something you couldn't do in Excel - where all the calculations were no doubt be manual).

Project can also calculate the duration of tasks for you, depending on how the tasks are linked up (or if they are interdependent - for example, a website can be designed, but not launched, until the hosting is in place). These links between the tasks are for you to input - Project will do the rest, and allow you to change and make your project more malleable than you would if it was still sitting (statically) in Excel.

One of the more common reasons why Project Managers like to keep using Excel for as long as possible is that they already know how to produce a project report by using the built in chart tools and pivot tables. They are reluctant to give up what they think is essential to the project reporting element of their job role, when in fact Project will give them the capability of making even better reports that are more conducive to project reporting than Excel is! Office (especially the more up-to-date capabilities in the 2007 suite) can link Office programs together. This is often forgotten. Therefore, you can make a Project file that links back to Excel and draws its information from it, so you never really have to "give up" the Excel crutch at all, if you so desire.

Visual reports can be produced easily by Project, and can be used in conjunction with Excel data. You can choose the report type in Project (for example, budget divided by staff salary), and the chart can be produced in Excel. You can choose between text reports or the visual ones (Gantt Charts are, after all, not just exclusive to Project, and any advanced Excel user will already know and recognise them). There are lots of existing templates for harvesting Excel data and migrating it over to Project - Microsoft Office Online has some of the more popular "official" ones, although as is usually the case with Office, there are plenty of open source, user-created ones for you to take a look at.

Conclusively, it isn't all that scary for a project manager to start using dedicated software instead of sticking to the tried and tested. The beauty of most of the Office suite, at least the 2007 versions, is the ability of programs to "talk" to each other and makes using them a lot easier. Using Excel alongside Project (at least at the start) will help pave the way to a more streamlined, faster and more satisfying use of software to get the job done.