How to create a Kanban board in Excel

Build and use an editable Kanban view on top of your Excel data to manage projects and to monitor progress.

Learn how to do it step by step.
Excel collaboration with Airrange
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Turn Excel tables into Kanban boards

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Share Excel based Kanban with your team

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Integrate Kanban boards into MS Teams

How does an Excel Kanban board in Airrange look like?

With Airrange, anyone can work on the main document - guided by detailed explanations and only with access to the data areas that are relevant to get the job done. And on top you’ll get full accountability and a memory layer for tracked changes and versions.

A Kanban board helps you to monitor progress in projects and tasks. Easily find out bottlenecks, handover steps, and get projects and tasks done faster - all based on Excel.

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Your step by step guide to creating a Kanban board in Excel with Airrange

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Start with an Excel table

Airrange uses Excel tables to create your Kanban boards. An Excel table is set up with one click. Open your Excel worksheet in Excel. Click on your list. Select "Insert" and "Table", name it, and save. Now, go to app.airrange.io and open your Excel workbook in Airrange. Select your Excel table and open it.

Learn more about Excel tables.
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Manage data entry requests
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Select Kanban view in Airrange

This step shows how to select the Kanban view in the Airrange editor. When opening an Excel table in Airrange, you'll get a view selection. Select the Kanban icon and click on it.
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Customize your Kanban board - link Excel columns

This is the step, that will shape your Kanban wall, board and cards. On the right side of the screen, you will find your Excel columns in drop-down lists.

Select the column field for your board and the title field as the main header for the cards. Any additional fields help you add more information to your Kanban cards. In the settings, you can change the color of the background design or add an image as a background on the Kanban wall.
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Manage data entry requests
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Name and save your Kanban view

Click on 'Create a new view' and name it. From now on, you'll find it in the view section. You can now share it instantly or share it from the view section of your Airrange workbook.
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Share and track your Kanban board

Time to use your Kanban board. Share it with your team or use it for reports or in websites. You can apply different sharing modes (read-only or edit). And all interactions with your Kanban board can be monitored on your sharing board.

Share your Excel Kanban board

  • by link
  • in Microsoft Teams
  • by email
  • by sending it to a group
  • by sharing it with individuals only
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All you need to know:
Kanban boards & Excel

With Airrange, anyone can work on the main document - guided by detailed explanations and only with access to the data areas that are relevant to get the job done. And on top you’ll get full accountability and a memory layer for tracked changes and versions.

What is a Kanban board?

A Kanban board is a visualization tool. It helps you to visualize workflows and to monitor progress in tasks. Kanban boards have a typically grid design with columns representing individual phase or steps and rows representing projects or tasks.

How does a Kanban board function?

In a Kanban board you move tasks through individual project steps or phases. Typically, these steps are similar "To do" or "Requested", "Doing", "Done" but can also be more refined and more detailed, like in a sales funnel.

How do I make a Kanban board?

Kanban boards can be designed physically on whiteboards with post its or digitally so you can move tasks by drag and drop to the next phase. All Kanban boards have the grid design in common where the first column is the starting point and the last column the final step.

How do I create a Kanban board in Excel?

With Airrange, you can create an interactive Kanban board based on the data of an existing Excel spreadsheet. This helps to visualize your Sales funnel, a content creation workflows, project progresses. To learn how to do it, click here.

What is the Kanban method?

Kanban was originally invented to optimize manufacturing processes and belongs to lean manufacturing. The Japanese term Kanban indicates visualization and coming from Kan (sign) and Ban (board). Today, Kanban is widely used in project management in agile development, marketing, HR, sales and other areas.

Why should I use a Kanban board?

A Kanban board clearly indicates bottlenecks, workload, and efficiency of workflows. It helps you to finish projects in time and get a better understanding of time consuming steps. It is also great in collaboration as you can hand-over from one step to the next in your team - simply by drag and drop.