Etapero vs Excel and Google Sheets

What Excel and Google Sheets are for a plan

Excel and Google Sheets are general-purpose spreadsheets. Plans in them are kept with templates: dates, durations and percentages are typed into cells or worked out with formulas. Excel has no built-in Gantt chart type: Microsoft’s help simulates one with a stacked bar chart or a ready template. In Google Sheets the plan also rests on templates and formulas that its author sets up and maintains.

Spreadsheets’ strengths

• No barrier to entry. Everyone can use a spreadsheet; nothing to buy or roll out.
• Complete freedom. Any columns, colours, formulas and summaries, exactly for your project.
• A quick start. A draft plan can be put together in an hour and shown to the customer.
• Co-editing in Google Sheets. Several people edit one file at once.

What users say

Authors on Habr, a Russian tech community, name a similar threshold over the years beyond which a spreadsheet stops coping.

In 2011 the author of an article on planning development chose Excel over MS Project and Jira on purpose: it rolls out “in zero time”, tasks are easy to rearrange, and plan and actuals are kept by week. But he also writes that the approach stops working once there are more than fifty tasks, the structure gets more complex and there are many people.

A 2026 article, “When Excel gets too tight”, lists the signs in detail: no single model of “project — person — work”, formula errors, a hard time summarising many projects, and in the end “twenty perfect templates”. A blog of another vendor describes similar problems: a plant with 25 investment projects, each manager with their own file, the project office compiling the report by hand every Friday, and a resource conflict — the chief technologist in three projects at once — staying invisible.

Spreadsheets also come back after systems are rolled out. The same blog looks at why staff return to Excel: double entry, clumsy forms, a missing report, and management itself living in spreadsheets.

Stories of adoption and moving

A blog of another vendor describes a research centre running preclinical trials: more than 200 staff, about 20 departments and 70–100 studies at once, kept in eight Excel spreadsheets. Collecting statuses took about an hour a day with calls round the departments; after the move, the authors say, control takes about 20 minutes. Not everything worked: some staff still keep Excel in parallel, and agreeing on one template took longer than setting up the system.

The lesson: a spreadsheet works while the plan fits in one person’s head. When there is a lot of linked work, you need a system that recalculates dates and builds the summary itself — and it still needs an agreed template and the habit of updating the plan.

How Etapero differs

Etapero tries to keep what people like about spreadsheets: the work breakdown is edited like a spreadsheet — typing in cells, pasting rows, working from the keyboard, undo and redo. A plan can be loaded from Excel or CSV, and the system shows what will change before anything is written.

The difference is that Etapero’s table understands the plan. Dates follow dependencies and the production calendar, the critical path is found automatically, and moving one piece of work moves everything that depends on it. A baseline records the approved dates, and slippage shows on every row and milestone without a separate plan/actual column.

For several projects there are no files to merge: the portfolio shows every project’s goals on one timeline, progress and red-zone risks and problems. If the project is small and the plan is needed once — for an estimate or a proposal — a spreadsheet remains the fastest tool, and there is no need to move.