WBS Builder

A WBS splits the whole of a project into smaller pieces, level by level, until each piece is small enough to estimate and assign. The top levels are phases or major deliverables; the lowest level holds the work packages people actually do. Everything the project delivers should appear somewhere in it, and nothing that is out of scope should.

Yes — it is a genuine .xlsx, not a renamed CSV. Numbers, dates and percentages arrive as real Excel values with number formats, so sorting, filtering and charting work immediately. Summary rows can carry live =SUM(), =MIN() and =MAX() formulas over their children, so the totals recalculate when you edit a task in Excel.

Yes. Add as many as you like, choose the type, and say how each one should roll up to its summary rows — sum, earliest, latest, average, or a weighted average by another column. The built-in columns can be renamed, retyped, reordered and hidden too. Your columns appear in the grid and in the download in the order you set.

Open a .xlsx, .xls, .ods or .csv file and the hierarchy is read from whichever convention it uses: a WBS code column like 1.2.1, one column per level, a numeric level column, or indented task names. Columns that match the ones here are reused; columns that do not are created for you. A pasted outline works too.

Yes. The Chart tab is a canvas: drag cards to place them, drag the background to pan, hold ⌘ or Ctrl and scroll to zoom, double-click a card to rename it, and use the +/− bubble on a summary card to fold a branch away. The layout is automatic until you move something, and Auto-layout puts every hand-placed card back. Because the chart and the spreadsheet are the same document, a card you drag is still a row in the Excel download.

No. The headings and the first two columns are frozen, the timeline blocks are coloured by conditional formatting so the bars appear on their own, % Complete gets a data bar, and the page is set to print landscape across one page wide. Dates, durations and percentages are real Excel values underneath, so you can sort, filter and chart them. Turn the formatting off in Layout & export if you would rather have a plain sheet.

Two ways, and both keep real dates rather than pictures. Copy for Excel puts the whole table on the clipboard — task, dates, duration, percent complete, and one column per day, week, month or quarter with a block where the task runs — so you paste it straight into a sheet and can see the shape of the plan at once; select the period columns and apply a conditional format to turn the blocks into coloured bars. Or download the .xlsx, which carries the same thing as its own Gantt sheet alongside the WBS.

The start and finish columns, which you can point at any date columns you like. Work packages get a bar from their own dates; summary tasks span their children automatically, because their start rolls up as the earliest and their finish as the latest. A task with only one date is drawn as a single day, which is how a milestone behaves. Percent complete fills the bar, and there is a dashed line for today.

Download it as a PNG for a slide or a document, or as an SVG if you want it to stay sharp at any size. You can also copy the image straight to the clipboard. For free-form work — extra shapes, arrows, annotations — Send to Canvas saves a diagram file that opens in the DO101 Canvas.

In this browser, on this device, and nowhere else. There is no account and no server, which is what keeps the tool free and private — and also means the breakdown will not appear on your other devices, and clearing your browsing data removes it. Use Save project file for a backup you can reopen here or keep alongside the spreadsheet.

Far enough that each work package can be estimated, owned and tracked by one person or team, and no further. A common rule of thumb is that a work package should be somewhere between eight and eighty hours of work. Three or four levels covers most projects; more than that usually means the schedule, not the scope, is being broken down.