Excel as Project Management Tool?

Maybe Excel is not the best tool for this task. The reason is that while Excel has many strengths in manipulating data and producing charts, it is not the most secure of tools for long term storage of valuable data. I've seen so many cases where data has been corrupted by sorting one column without also sorting the others and a simple slip of the mouse can easily change or delete data and there is no way of undoing the damage once the workbook is closed.

A better solution would be a database. There are a lot to choose from - look up Database on Wikipedia to get started.

These are not only more secure (e.g. you can't sort rows in the stored data but you can extract them in sorted order) but you can also exercise a greater degree of data quality, e.g. making sure that records in one table match up with another.

If you are forced to use Excel, filtering and sorting by date will work as will conditional formatting to, for example, turn cells red if a deadline has passed.

Hope that this is useful. Good luck in getting the job.

I don't know what you would want included so this is a very basic example. It uses a table for the data and a Pivot Table for a summary of the data. Conditional Formatting identifies Behind Schedule projects.