Plan a Store Launch in Excel: Schedule, Critical Path and Earned Value

<p>Nandini Rao runs store launches for Tulsi Living, a homeware chain opening its first store in Pune and then one in a Kochi mall. Its last launch opened three weeks late because nobody could see which task was deciding the opening day. Across five lessons you build the plan she needs in your own personal workbook, the way project managers do it: convert vendor lead times quoted in weeks into working days, run the forward and backward passes of the critical path method with XLOOKUP and FILTER (without a single circular reference), find the float and the critical path, turn day numbers into real dates on a Monday-to-Saturday week with the company's holidays using WORKDAY.INTL, draw a Gantt chart, and measure progress at the status date with earned value: PV, EV, SPI, CPI and a forecast of the final cost. Every lesson then hands the same job to your AI (Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini) and shows you how to catch its mistakes, from a stray space that IFERROR hides to a percentage read as 4000%. In the capstone your agent plans the whole Kochi launch from a written brief, and you prove it right.</p>

Tools: Critical Path Method (CPM), Forward and Backward Pass, XLOOKUP, FILTER and TRIM, Expanding Ranges and Circular References, WORKDAY.INTL and NETWORKDAYS.INTL, TEXTJOIN, Earned Value (PV, EV, SPI, CPI, EAC), Gantt Charts and Conditional Formatting, AI Assistants for Excel