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This episode is sponsored by The PM PrepCast for The PMP® Exam:

Here’s a little secret for you -- everybody does it. At one point or another during their careers, every project manager will use Microsoft Excel to manage one of their projects!

That in itself is not surprising. After all, budgets are often tight and companies may not want to invest into full blown project management software. And if they have such a software there are only a limited number of licenses available, which means many stakeholders cannot access the tool. So we project managers make due with what we have. And practically everyone has Microsoft Office.

But what is surprising is the fact that we just improvise. We will simply use Excel to the best of our often mediocre knowledge in order to somehow force a project schedule into those cells.

Well... enter Doug Hong (http://www.linkedin.com/in/doughong/en) and his series of seven free Microsoft Excel tutorials, that you can find at http://www.exceltraining101.com/excel-project-management/ [Update: the template website is no longer available, so we removed the link] . In these seven short videos Doug shows you how to use MS Excel and create professional Gantt charts, work breakdown structures, checklists, pareto charts and more. All for free.

And because I liked the free approach I decided to invite Doug and ask him when and how we should use MS Excel, what Excel features we should learn about to better use it for our projects, and how we can identify the moment in our projects when Excel is really no longer the right tool and we have to upgrade to something more solid.

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This is a special episode of The PM PrepCast for the launch of our new PMP Exam Coaching program.

This is the final interview in our series where we focus on PMP exam coaching and it is also the third interview where a PMP exam student talks about her personal journey and experience in using a PMP exam tutor.

In this interview you will hear the story of Tara Guidi, PMP. Tara attended a condensed PMP training class and then unfortunately failed her PMP exam. Once she realized that the condensed approach wasn't for her she chose to try PMP coaching where a professional PMP coach works directly with her and a personalized training schedule.

The approach was successful. She passed her exam.

Please visit www.pm-prepcast.com/coaching for more information about our PMP exam coaching program.

Play Now:

This is a special episode of The PM PrepCast for the launch of our new PMP Exam Coaching program.

This is the second of three interviews in this series, in which we focus on the coaching student. It's a lessons learned interview from the perspective of the PMP exam student who used a coach so that we can learn how a PMP Tutor helps his students to achieve success.

In this interview we welcome Derek Satz, PMP and we will be hearing about his trials and tribulations in preparing for this exam. One very notable fact about Derek is this: Derek has 11 certifications to his name and he says that the PMP certification was the most difficult one to achieve.

I asked him why he thinks that the PMP exam is so much more difficult and I read you his answer during the introduction of the interview. It's a long introduction, but worth hearing.

Please visit www.pm-prepcast.com/coaching for more information about our PMP exam coaching program.

Play Now:

This is a special episode of The PM PrepCast for the launch of our new PMP Exam Coaching program.

In the first two interviews about PMP Exam Coaching, we heard from a PMP Tutor about his work and how he helps students as they are prepping for their PMP exam. Now we want to switch the focus to the students. This is the first of three interviews with PMP exam students who decided to use a coach during their exam preparation.

First off we meet Cathy Vasile, PMP. She had a hard time translating her initial training into PMP exam success. So she decided to work with a PMP coach and achieved success.

We learn about her journey from start to finish, talk about how the coach personalized the training for her needs, and why she feels that this was money well spent.

Please visit www.pm-prepcast.com/coaching for more information about our PMP exam coaching program.