ChatGPT for Project Management: Two Prompts That Work
Almost every project manager I teach has the same two hours in their week that they would love to get back. The first hour is spent after the status meeting, scrolling through notes trying to remember who actually promised what. The second is spent in a spreadsheet, eyeballing dates and trying to work out which tasks are quietly slipping. Using ChatGPT for project management takes a real bite out of both of them, and it is not complicated.
What trips people up is the vague advice they read online — “use AI to save time on your projects.” That is not a technique. That is a slogan. So here are two specific things, with the exact wording, that you can do in the next ten minutes.
ChatGPT for Project Management: Turn a Meeting Transcript Into a Real Action List
If you record your status calls in Teams or Zoom, you already have a transcript sitting there. Most people never open it because reading 45 minutes of transcript is worse than just remembering. That is exactly the job to hand off.
Open ChatGPT, paste the transcript, and use a prompt that tells it what the output has to look like. Vague prompts get vague summaries. This one does not:
You are my project coordinator. Below is the raw transcript of a status meeting. Extract every commitment a person actually made. Return a table with four columns: Owner, Task, Due Date, Confidence. Confidence is High, Medium or Low — how sure you are this was a real commitment and not just discussion. If no due date was said out loud, put "not stated" — do not invent a date. Ignore general conversation. After the table, list anything that sounded like a risk or a blocker as a separate bulleted list.
Two parts of that prompt are doing the heavy lifting. The Confidence column gives you something to scan: you read the Low rows carefully and trust the High rows. And “do not invent a date” matters more than you would think — left to itself, a model will happily fill an empty cell with a plausible-looking Friday, and you will send that out to your team as fact.
When the table looks right, add one more line: Now give me the same table as comma-separated values with a header row. Copy that, paste it into cell A1 in Excel, then use Data > Text to Columns > Delimited > Comma to split it into real columns. Now it is a tracker, not a paragraph.
The gotcha: transcripts contain names, client details and sometimes numbers your company does not want in a public chatbot. Check your organization’s policy first, and use your work account rather than a personal one if you have a business ChatGPT or Copilot license.
Ask Copilot in Excel Which Tasks Are Actually Slipping
The second hour goes to the tracker. You have a task list in Excel with Task, Owner, Baseline Finish, Forecast Finish and % Complete. Every week you scan it looking for trouble. Copilot will do the scanning.
First, two setup steps that are not optional. Click anywhere in your data and press Ctrl+T to turn it into a real Excel Table. Then save the file to OneDrive or SharePoint with AutoSave on. Copilot in Excel simply will not engage with a loose range in a local file — this is the single most common reason people tell me “the button does nothing.”
Now go to the Home tab, click Copilot, and type:
Add a column called Slip Days that shows Forecast Finish minus Baseline Finish. Then highlight the rows where Slip Days is more than 5 and % Complete is under 50.
Copilot inserts the column, writes the structured formula for you — something like =[@[Forecast Finish]]-[@[Baseline Finish]] — and applies the conditional formatting. It shows you the formula before it commits, so you can check it rather than trust it. Follow up with Show me total slip days by owner as a bar chart and you have the picture you were going to build by hand.
The gotcha here is dates. If your finish dates were pasted in from another system, they may be text that only looks like dates. The quick test: click the column and look at the alignment — real dates sit on the right, text sits on the left. If they are text, select the column, go to Data > Text to Columns, click Finish, and Excel converts them. Do that before you ask Copilot to subtract anything, or you will get errors and blame the AI.
Plenty more on the calendar
If you want to see both of these done live, with a real project file on screen, I am running ChatGPT and Copilot for Project Management on Friday, September 4. We go through prompt wording for status reports, action items and risk registers, and then move into Excel to build the slippage view and the owner summary — the whole loop, start to finish, with time for your questions.
The full current schedule is on the front page of PCWebinars.com, and new dates go up as they are confirmed. Register for this one, or have a look at what else is coming — there is usually something on Excel, Power BI, Copilot or Claude within the next week or two.
About your trainer
I’m Tom Fragale. I’ve been a computer trainer and consultant for more than 30 years, and I’ve taught well over 30,000 people how to get more out of the software they already own — Excel, Access, Power BI, Word, Outlook, and now the AI tools that sit on top of all of it: Claude, ChatGPT, and Microsoft Copilot. My background is applied, not theoretical. Alongside teaching, I build real databases and reporting systems for clients in Excel, Access, and Power BI, so the examples I use in class are the problems I ran into last week, not textbook exercises. I also publish free tutorials on YouTube and longer courses online.
If any of this is useful to you, come see the rest of what I teach at PCWebinars.com.
