A good status report is short, brief, and tells a lot with very little. The attached file is about as minimalist as I could make it. It does not tell the dates that have passed, therefore the manager viewing it will not be able to see where the schedule went wrong. Nor are plan vs. actual start and stop dates visible. You could easily add these.

The most important item is the bar chart, made manually with two simple boxes, a black triangle, and some labels. It tells quite a bit with a very intuitive graphic: overall status, percent complete, original planned percent complete for this date, and how much is left to go. You might be surprised if you use this that it contains more information than your boss is used to getting.

Big projects with millions on the line usually have a more complex format with multiple slides. This attachment is good enough for a small, low-visibility effort that only needs minimal reporting.

Attached is a simple status report on a single slide in powerpoint.

Project Status Template (PPT)

Here’s a preview of the file: