A key part of project planning is creating a timeline or a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS). While you can ask an AI to simply "create a project plan," the real power comes from asking it to format the output in a way that's immediately usable in your favorite tools, like Microsoft Excel.

The Strategy: Table-Formatted Output

The goal is to have the AI generate a project plan as a simple table (using markdown format) that you can copy and paste directly into an Excel sheet. This structured data can then be used to create a Gantt chart or a more detailed project schedule.

Step 1: Provide Context from a Past Project (Optional but Recommended) To get a more realistic timeline, you can give the AI data from a similar past project.

• Example Context: "For a previous 4-month project to build a similar mobile app, the 'Design' phase took 3 weeks and the 'Backend Development' phase took 6 weeks."

Step 2: Craft Your Prompt with a Table Format Your prompt should clearly define the new project and explicitly ask for the output to be a markdown table.

Example Prompt:

"Act as an expert project scheduler. My team is building a new e-commerce mobile app for iOS. The app needs user accounts, a product catalog, and a checkout flow.

Based on this, generate a high-level project plan.

CRITICAL: The output must be a markdown table with exactly four columns: 'Phase', 'Task', 'Estimated Duration (Days)', and 'Dependencies'.

The 'Phase' column should group tasks into logical stages like 'Planning', 'Design', 'Development', etc."

The Result: Copy-Paste-Ready Data

The AI will generate something like this:

Phase	Task	Estimated Duration (Days)	Dependencies
Planning	Define MVP Requirements	5	-
Planning	Market & Competitor Analysis	5	-
Design	Create Wireframes	10	Define MVP
Design	High-Fidelity UI Mockups	15	Create Wireframes
Development	Setup Backend & Database	10	Define MVP
Development	Build User Account System	15	Setup Backend
...	...	...	...

This structured output is incredibly valuable. You can select the entire table, copy it, and paste it directly into an empty Excel spreadsheet. Excel will automatically parse the data into the correct columns. From there, you can use Excel's built-in charting tools to create a visual timeline or Gantt chart, saving you hours of manual data entry.