Looking for project tracking ideas

Hi,

As the title suggests I’m trying to create an Excel sheet that tracks the progress of various projects.

Essentially, I was given a messy excel document to look after. I don’t have particularly advanced skills and nor do I want to spend too much time on this. So…

One sheet lists projects as rows and they all have a reference code. There is a column designated for “action updates” where people overwrite progress each month. Other columns exist for project status, dates etc.

My idea was to create another sheet which also lists the projects but acts as an action/change history log. I attempted to have a drop down through grouped cells that would act as a historic list of all changes and action updates around each project. The row with the corresponding project number would act as a “live view”, so using an X look up to display this data on the original sheet.

Is there a better way to create something like this?

There must be loads of ways to do something like this, but I just can’t think which way to do it!!

Thank you for any help!!!