Every project manager has a spreadsheet that looked brilliant in the kickoff meeting and slowly turned into a liability. According to arraspeople.co.uk, the typical pain points are selective or stale status data, manual reformatting for different stakeholders, files scattered across drives, and hours wasted on repetitive reporting. The piece profiles Sharktower's free Excel and Power BI reporting package as a fix, and the underlying point is bigger than the tool.
For project leads, the interesting question is what an automated reporting setup looks like in practice, and what it frees you to do.
What happened
- Spreadsheets have been the default project status format for nearly 40 years.
- They are not built to absorb continuous change in complex programmes.
- A common pattern is one person updating the Gantt almost all of the time and the team looking at it rarely.
- The reference describes going through about a fifth of the chart and never touching the rest.
- Automated Excel and Power BI templates cut repetitive reporting work.
- The same templates can be wired into SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.
What the reference actually argues
The arraspeople.co.uk piece opens with a quote from Intuit co-founder Scott D. Cook about failures that came with great-looking spreadsheets, and uses it to frame the deeper issue. Gantt-style spreadsheets and programmes are not designed for the kind of continuous change most modern projects run through. Status reports go stale, data sits in different files and formats, and reporting consumes hours that should go to delivery.
Sharktower is profiled as a platform that solves the underlying problem, but the team behind it also built a free reporting package for organisations not yet ready to buy new software. The package includes two files: an Excel spreadsheet that mirrors a typical spreadsheet project, and a Power BI template with pre-built views and a roadmap layout. Instructions cover data connection, dashboard setup and tips for SharePoint and Microsoft Teams integration. The package is positioned as "the next best thing" to the full platform.
Why this matters for project leads
The honest version of this story is not about any vendor. It is about what happens to a project manager's week when reporting eats the working day. That is the part nobody budgets for and everybody complains about.
Three things go wrong when reporting is manual. First, the data goes stale between the moment you pull it and the moment the meeting starts. Second, the report gets shaped for the loudest stakeholder instead of the ones who actually need it. Third, the project manager becomes a reporting clerk instead of a leader, which is the slowest and most expensive failure mode in the list.
Watch who benefits from automation. The project manager gets time back for stakeholder conversations and risk management. The team gets a report they actually trust. Senior leaders get the same data faster, which usually means they ask better questions. The person who loses is whoever built their personal brand on being the only one who could update the master sheet, and that loss is healthy for the project.
Worked example: say you run a programme with several workstreams and a weekly steering meeting
Build the source-of-truth Excel once, with one tab per workstream and a master tab that rolls up status, risks, RAG ratings and decisions. Wire the master tab into a Power BI dashboard with three views: a one-page executive summary, a risk heatmap, and a milestone timeline. Send stakeholders a link to the dashboard, not a copy of the Excel. Refresh the data daily from the underlying project management tool using a scheduled query, so the dashboard is never far behind reality. Spend the time you used to spend formatting on a short Monday call with each workstream lead. The dashboard does the reporting. You do the leading.
What to watch next
Expect more project management platforms to ship native Power BI and Excel connectors in the next year, which will make the manual data wrangling step obsolete for any team using a mainstream tool. Watch for the slow death of the weekly status deck as the primary reporting format, replaced by live dashboards with a short narrative attached. The project managers who thrive in that shift are the ones who treat the dashboard as a conversation starter, not as a substitute for one. Also watch for AI-generated status narratives to land in mainstream tools, which will save the writing time but still need a human eye for the load-bearing decisions.
Bottom line
The spreadsheet is not the enemy. The manual reporting loop is. Build a single source of truth, automate the rollup, and spend the hours you get back on the conversations that actually move the programme. The report should serve the project, not the other way round.
Frequently asked questions
Why do most project status reports go stale so quickly?
Because they are usually assembled manually from multiple files, often by one person, in the hours before the meeting. Any change after that moment is invisible until the next cycle.
What is the difference between a project dashboard and a status report?
A status report is a snapshot, usually a slide deck or PDF, sent on a schedule. A dashboard is a live view, refreshed automatically, that stakeholders can pull whenever they need it.
How can Power BI help with project status reporting?
It connects to the underlying data source, runs scheduled refreshes, and produces visual views that are easier to scan than a wide Excel sheet. Stakeholders see the same numbers without waiting for the next report.
How often should a project dashboard be refreshed?
For most operational projects, daily. For long-running programmes with slower change, a weekly refresh is usually enough. The rule is that no stakeholder should ever see data older than the refresh window.
What is the most common project reporting mistake?
Spending more time formatting the report than interrogating the data. Automation fixes the formatting. Leadership still has to ask the right questions of the numbers.