In this video of #engineeringmanagementacademy #excel solve #CriticalPathMethod is tutored by #drmehrdadarashpour → #criticalpathanalysis #criticalpath
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⌛ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Introduction to the Critical Path Method (CPM)
0:25 - “Create Table” Feature in Excel
0:47 - Step 1 (Calculate Early Start “ES” Dates Based on the Project Network Logic)
1:29 - Step 2 (Create Table in Excel & Find Early Finish “EF” Dates)
2:21 - Step 3 (Calculate Late Finish “LF” Dates Based on the Project Network Logic)
3:00 - Step 4 (Find Late Start “LS” Dates in Excel)
3:24 - Final Project Float (Slack) calculation in Excel

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Critical Path Method or CPM is very useful in project time management. Today, we’ll be using Excel to calculate it.
In a previous video, we provided a brief overview of project time management using Critical Path Method or CPM. The link to that video can be found here ([ Ссылка ]). Now, we want to calculate project critical path using Excel spreadsheets. Although Excel does not provide a direct solution for critical path analysis or CPA, we can activate the "Create Table" feature, to streamline our calculations. You can follow along by getting the Excel workbook via this link: [ Ссылка ]
Let’s start with a small project with 8 activities for which durations and dependencies or predecessors are specified. We can follow only 4 simple steps to calculate the project critical path.
Step 1 is to Calculate the “early start” date of each activity based on the project network logic
In this example, we start with “Activity A”, which is the first project activity with an early start on day zero. We can record these early start dates in our Excel workbook. A duration of 5 days for “Activity A” suggests an early start date of 5 for Activities B, C and D. “Activity B” has a long duration of 15 days. It will finish on day 20, which will be the early start date for Activities E & F. Network forward pass is continued to find the early start of 30 for “Activity G” and 50 for “Activity H”.

Step 2 is to activate the "Create Table" feature in Excel and find the early finish dates
We should select the range of cells containing our project data and then press “CTRL+T”, and from the “Create Table” menu check the box “My table has headers” and then press OK. Now Excel has tabulated our data & we can remove the filter from the first row by selecting that and deactivating “filter” from the “Data” menu. The beauty of “create table” function is that "@" symbol can be used in Excel structured references to refer to a column name within a table. Now, we can easily calculate “Early Finish” dates. Click on the cell related to “Activity A” & press the “=” sign & select the “Duration” cell. After that, press the “+” sign & select the “Early start” cell & press “enter”. You can see that “early finish” dates are calculated for all project activities.

Step 3 is to Calculate the “late finish” date of each activity based on the project network logic
we start with “Activity H”, which is the last project activity with a late finish of 70 days. We can record these “late finish” dates in our workbook. A duration of 20 for “Activity H” suggests a late finish date of 50 for Activities E & G. “Activity G” has a duration of 20 days. It will start on day 30, which will be the “late finish” date for “Activity F”. Network backward pass is continued to find the late finish date of 20 for activities B, C & D. The late finish date for “Activity A” will be 5 days.

Step 4 is to find the Late Start dates in Excel
We observed that the beauty of the “create table” function is that "@" symbol can be used in Excel structured references to refer to a column name within our project table. Now, we can easily calculate “Late Start” dates. Click on the cell related to “Activity A” & press the “=” sign & select the “Late Finish” cell. After that, press the “-” sign & select the “Duration” cell & press “enter”. You can see that “Late Start” dates are calculated for all project activities.

You may want to calculate float or slack since we have the required data. Click on the cell related to “Activity A” & press the “=” sign & select the “Late Finish” cell. After that, press the “-” sign & select the “Early_Finish” cell & press “enter”. You can see that “Activity Float” is calculated for all tasks. Those activities with zero slack are critical, including A, B, F, G & H. Float calculations can also be done on by subtracting “early start” from “Late start” for our project activities, which will have the same results…
And there you have it: an easy calculation of project critical path using only 4 simple steps in Microsoft Excel.

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