Project Documentation Template for Excel

A project documentation template brings clarity and structure to your entire project from day one. Whether you’re aligning teams, tracking progress or keeping stakeholders informed, it helps you stay organized and focused. With everything documented in one place, teams can collaborate more effectively, reduce risk and keep work moving forward—no matter the complexity or scope.

ProjectManager’s free documentation template for Excel

Why Use a Project Documentation Template?

A project documentation template is a standardized format used to capture and organize key information throughout the lifecycle of a project. It typically includes sections for scope, objectives, timelines, roles, resources, risks and deliverables, providing a consistent structure that ensures nothing critical is overlooked. By having all relevant data in one centralized document, teams can align more easily, make informed decisions and maintain continuity even as team members change or projects evolve.

Using a project documentation template improves efficiency and reduces confusion by eliminating the need to start from scratch for each new project. It also enhances accountability, as responsibilities and expectations are clearly outlined from the beginning. Whether managing a small internal initiative or a large-scale construction project, this project documentation template serves as a single source of truth, streamlining communication, minimizing risk and keeping everyone on track from planning to completion.

A project documentation template lays the groundwork for effectively using project management software. By organizing key project details that feed directly into ProjectManager, an award-winning project and portfolio management software, information like scope, timeline, resources and milestones from the template can be easily translated into Gantt charts. This sets up the project structure in a format that’s trackable and actionable. More than that, our Gantt chart links all four types of task dependencies to avoid cost overruns and bottlenecks, can filter for the critical path to identify tasks with zero slack and set a baseline to track progress in real time. Get started with ProjectManager today for free.

ProjectManager's Gantt chart — ProjectManager’s Gantt chart turns a project documentation template into an actionable plan. Learn more

When to Use a Project Documentation Template

A project documentation template should be used at the very beginning of a project—during the planning or initiation phase—to clearly define goals, scope, timelines, responsibilities and key deliverables. It’s also valuable throughout the project lifecycle whenever there are updates, milestones reached, scope changes or team transitions.

Whether you’re launching a new initiative, managing a complex build or closing out a completed project, this template helps keep everything organized, aligned and traceable—ensuring consistent communication, accountability and control from start to finish.

Who Should Use This Project Documentation Template?

Project managers, team leads and stakeholders involved in planning, executing or overseeing a project should use a project documentation template. It’s especially useful for anyone responsible for aligning teams, managing resources, tracking progress, or communicating with clients and executives.

Cross-functional teams—such as engineering, construction, IT, or marketing—can also benefit by using the template to ensure consistency and clarity across departments. Ultimately, anyone who needs a structured, reliable way to document and manage a project from beginning to end will find this template essential.

How to Use This Project Documentation Template for Excel

Here is a step-by-step guide on how to use the project documentation template in Excel to help you get started.

Step 1: Review the Structure

Your template is already organized by columns such as project phase, document name, description, owner, status, dates and link—so it’s ready to go. Take a moment to familiarize yourself with the layout and how each section is grouped by project phase.

Step 2: Customize Project Details

Start filling in or updating the rows to reflect your current project:

Make sure each document listed is relevant to your project.
Update the project document owner to assign responsibility.
If a document doesn’t apply, you can delete or repurpose the row.

Project documentation template name, description and owner columns

Step 3: Track Status and Dates

Use the status column to indicate the stage of each document (e.g., draft, in progress, approved). Update the date created and last updated fields as progress is made. This helps track which documents need attention and when they were last reviewed.

Step 4: Link to Files

Ensure the location/link column is populated with accessible paths to your actual documents, such as SharePoint, Google Drive or your company server. This makes it easy for team members to locate and open the files directly from the template.

Project documentation template link to files column

Step 5: Maintain Regular Updates

Treat this template as a living document. Revisit it during project check-ins or phase transitions to:

Update statuses and ownership
Add new documents as needed
Ensure everything stays aligned with project progress

Step 6: Share and Collaborate

Store the completed template in a central location (like SharePoint or your project management platform), and make sure key stakeholders have access. This promotes transparency, accountability and easy collaboration across the team

ProjectManager Goes Beyond a Project Documentation Template

Unlike static project documentation templates that simply store information, ProjectManager goes further by turning plans into action with multiple dynamic project views. Instead of tracking progress manually, teams can instantly visualize and manage work in Gantt charts, task lists, kanban boards, calendars or sheet views—all synced in real time.

This allows for live collaboration, faster updates and greater visibility into every phase of the project, making it easy to stay aligned, adjust on the fly and keep projects moving forward efficiently.

Turn Plans Into Action With Resource Management Features

Our software enhances project documentation by transforming plans into action with powerful resource management tools. The team page gives a centralized view of each team member’s roles and availability, while color-coded workload charts help balance assignments and prevent burnout.

Real-time availability settings ensure resources are scheduled based on actual capacity, not assumptions. Together, these tools allow for smarter planning, more accurate timelines and better use of people and equipment, keeping projects on track and teams working efficiently.

Track Project Metrics in Real Time With Dashboards, Reports and Templates

Use robust tracking tools to provide real-time insight into progress, performance and budget. The live dashboard offers a visual snapshot of key metrics like task completion, time logged and cost variances. Customizable reports allow teams to analyze performance by phase, resource or deliverable, while secure timesheets track actual hours worked to keep labor costs accurate. These tools ensure that documented plans are actively monitored, helping teams stay on schedule, control costs and respond quickly to changes.

Project Documentation Template

Why Use a Project Documentation Template?

When to Use a Project Documentation Template

Who Should Use This Project Documentation Template?