How to Create a Work in Progress Report in Excel with AI

Tracking every moving part of a marketing campaign or sales initiative can feel completely overwhelming. A Work in Progress (WIP) report is your command center, bringing clarity to the chaos by showing what's done, what's next, and where the bottlenecks are. This guide will walk you through creating a powerful WIP report directly in Excel, starting with the fundamentals and then showing you how to use Excel's AI features to get insights faster than ever before.

What Exactly is a Work in Progress (WIP) Report?

A WIP report is a document that tracks the status of all active projects or tasks within a business, department, or team. It's not just a to-do list, it's a living snapshot of your progress against key metrics like timelines, budget, and resources. Essentially, it helps answer critical questions at a glance:

• What tasks are currently being worked on?

• Who is responsible for each task?

• Are projects on schedule or falling behind?

• Are we staying within budget?

• Where are the roadblocks preventing progress?

For a marketing team, this could mean tracking the progress of a new quarter's campaigns, from content creation and ad design to landing page development and email sequence writing. A sales team might use a WIP report to monitor key deals, tracking stages, follow-up activities, and contract statuses. It transforms gut feelings about project health into a clear, data-backed overview that everyone can understand.

Step 1: Setting Up Your Data in Excel

Before any analysis or fancy charting can happen, you need clean, well-structured data. The quality of your WIP report depends entirely on the data you feed it. Create an Excel sheet with a table that includes clear, specific columns. The more structured this is, the better Excel’s AI tools will be able to understand and analyze it.

Here are the essential columns we recommend for a robust WIP report:

• Project Name: The overall initiative the task belongs to (e.g., "Q4 Holiday Campaign").

• Task ID: A unique identifier for each task, making it easy to reference.

• Task Description: A clear, concise description of the task (e.g., "Design Facebook Ad Creative").

• Assigned To: The name of the person responsible for the task.

• Start Date: The date the task was or is scheduled to begin.

• Due Date: The deadline for the task's completion.

• Status: The current state of the task. Use a dropdown list to ensure consistency (e.g., Not Started, In Progress, Blocked, Completed, In Review).

• % Complete: A numerical value (0-100) indicating how far along the task is.

• Budgeted Hours: The estimated number of hours required for the task.

• Actual Hours: The number of hours spent on the task to date.

• Notes: A column for any relevant comments, updates, or links.

Pro Tip: Format as a Table

Once you've set up your columns, enter a couple of rows of data and then format your data as a table. You can do this by selecting any cell in your data range and clicking Insert > Table (or using the shortcut Ctrl + T). This simple step makes your data much easier to manage, adds filtering capabilities, and is essential for working with features like PivotTables and Analyze Data.

Step 2: Traditional Reporting Methods in Excel

Before we jump into the AI tools, it's helpful to understand the manual ways of building a WIP report. These methods are still incredibly useful for creating a visual dashboard and form the foundation of most Excel reporting.

Visualize Status with Conditional Formatting

Conditional Formatting automatically changes a cell's appearance based on its value, giving you an immediate visual cue about project health. It’s perfect for highlighting overdue tasks.

Here's how to create a rule to automatically highlight tasks that are past their due date but aren't yet completed:

1. Select all the data in your table (excluding the headers).

2. Go to the Home tab and click on Conditional Formatting > New Rule.

3. Choose Use a formula to determine which cells to format.

4. In the formula box, enter the following formula. (Assuming your ‘Due Date’ is in column G and ‘Status’ is in column F, with your data starting on row 2):=AND($G2<TODAY(), $F2<>"Completed")

5. Click the Format button, go to the Fill tab, and select a light red color.

6. Click OK twice.

Now, any row with an overdue task will be immediately highlighted in red, drawing attention to areas that need action.

Summarize Data with PivotTables

PivotTables are the powerhouse of Excel analysis. They allow you to quickly summarize large datasets without writing complex formulas. You can use a PivotTable to create a summary view that answers key questions like, "How many tasks is each team member working on?"

Steps:

1. Click anywhere inside your data table.

2. Go to the Insert tab and click PivotTable.

3. In the PivotTable Fields pane on the right, drag and drop fields into the four areas:

   • Drag "Assigned To" into the Rows area.

   • Drag "Status" into the Columns area.

   • Drag "Task ID" into the Values area. Make sure it’s set to "Count of Task ID", not "Sum".

Instantly, you'll have a summary table showing a count of tasks for each person, broken down by their current status. This is far quicker than building a manual dashboard with COUNTIFS formulas.

Step 3: Supercharge Your Report with Built-in AI

This is where things get really interesting. Excel has powerful AI and machine learning features built right in that can automate the analysis process, turning raw data into meaningful insights with just a few clicks.

Get Instant Insights with "Analyze Data"

Excel's "Analyze Data" feature (formerly called Ideas) is like having a junior data analyst on your team. It examines your data and automatically suggests relevant summaries, charts, and PivotTables that you might find useful.

Using it couldn't be simpler:

1. Click on a single cell inside your formatted data table.

2. Go to the Home tab and click the Analyze Data button on the far right.

3. A pane will open on the right-hand side, showing you numerous insights based on your WIP data.

You might see suggestions like:

• A bar chart showing the "Sum of Actual Hours by Project".

• A PivotTable analyzing the count of tasks for each status.

• A chart identifying team members with the highest number of overdue tasks.

If you see a chart or PivotTable you like, just click the + Insert button, and Excel will add it to a new sheet in your workbook. This feature is fantastic for quickly spotting trends or patterns you might have otherwise missed.

Ask Questions with Natural Language

Beyond the automated suggestions, you can also use the question box at the top of the Analyze Data pane to ask specific questions in plain English. This turns data analysis into a simple conversation.

Questions you might ask:

• "Show me the total budgeted hours vs actual hours for the Q4 Holiday Campaign"

• "Count of tasks where status is blocked"

• "Which person has the most tasks assigned?"

Excel’s AI will interpret your query and generate a chart or value that answers your question. It's an astoundingly fast way to get custom insights without building anything manually.

Using Copilot and Other AI Add-ins

If you're using Microsoft 365, Copilot takes this conversational AI to the next level. You can trigger Copilot to analyze your sheet and ask even more complex questions. Examples:

• "Create a summary of all overdue tasks, including who they are assigned to and how many days they are late."

• "Generate a formula for a new column called 'Variance' that calculates the difference between budgeted and actual hours."

• "Based on the data, identify the top three projects that are at the highest risk of going over budget."

Copilot can not only generate the insights but also create new visualizations, add formulas, and provide a written summary of its findings, all without you having to touch your mouse. It drastically reduces the time spent on manual number-crunching and report building.

Best Practices for Maintaining Your WIP Report

A WIP report is only useful if it's accurate and up-to-date. Here are a few tips to ensure your report remains a valuable tool.

• Keep a Single Source of Truth: Everyone on the team should access and update the same file. Using a file stored on SharePoint or OneDrive helps prevent version control issues.

• Standardize Your Inputs: Use data validation (dropdown lists) for fields like "Status" and "Assigned To" to prevent typos and ensure consistency.

• Schedule Regular Updates: A report is useless if the data is stale. Set aside time each week—for example, during a team meeting—to have everyone update their tasks. This keeps the data fresh and holds team members accountable.

Final Thoughts

Creating a Work in Progress report in Excel has evolved from a fully manual process to one where AI can do much of the heavy lifting. By organizing your data methodically and leveraging tools like Analyze Data and Copilot, you can move from simple tracking to generating real insights that drive better project decisions.

Even with these powerful tools, a common bottleneck remains: pulling data into one place. Your project data might live across a dozen different platforms—your CRM, ad managers, email platforms, and more. For that, we built Graphed to be your AI data analyst. It connects directly to your marketing and sales tools, so instead of manually updating spreadsheets, you can ask in plain English, "Show me a dashboard of salesperson performance from HubSpot" or "Create a marketing funnel report using Google Analytics and Shopify data." We automatically pull the live data and build the real-time dashboards for you in seconds.