Tester Planning (MPP vs Excel)

Last week we discussed about the plan with my manager. He wants me to come up with a plan for my testing in two days. It was not tough with i aware of the testing involved that would be mostly regression and the additional of few scenarios based on the changes.The initial step was to go through he requirement document and understand the changes and once i understood the changes and was aware of scenarios to be included; the next step is to put all the analysis in plan document and come up with the date. I need a tool. So i approached my IT team with requesting them for MPP ; that is quiet a tool for your planning needs take cares of business days, holidays,resources in your plan. Though i was more focused on coming up with effort and dates. The process of getting approval for license for Microsoft Project plan was difficult as it was costing 300-600$ and i was sure i wont get approval. So i decided to explore the obvious excel and there i came to know few functions that would be handy to come up with basic plan.

Here are few functions in excel which will come with Analysis pack add-in
1. Workday
2. Networkdays
3. Date

I used workday and date and also the Data->group function was handy to come up with Task and Sub-task structure as in MPP with only business day.Below is screen shot of my plan.There are lot many functions which i will explore later and come up with complete tools  for my Test planning.