[hallihax]

I've experienced this before; my recommendation would be to pitch an alternative tool to the PM based on how that tool would make the PM's job easier / more effective. It's probably true that almost anything would be better suited to the development workflow than an Excel spreadsheet - but in this particular use-case, Excel is fulfilling your PM's requirements: it's keeping track of issues.

What Excel won't do, without significant work (which will almost certainly fall to the developer and not the PM):

Track issue history / comments / activity against a repository. Wouldn't it be better for your PM to be able to identify, at a glance, exactly which branch & commit a particular fix or change is in?

Integrate with your CI / build system: Wouldn't it be better for your PM if issues were automatically marked as 'ready to test' when the relevant build is completed?

Provide a workflow against the list of active issues. Wouldn't it better for your PM to rest assured that any incoming issues are easily triaged & assigned within a well-defined workflow that tracks an issue from first-report to completion & sign-off?

Don't fight them - sell to them. Explain why a different solution will be better for them and you.

[cweagans]

Counterpoint: many of those features are unnecessary, especially on a smaller team and an intentionally simple tracking tool can force simple development processes. It’s neither good nor bad - it’s a question of whether or not the tool fits the environment.

Excel based bug tracking certainly has its place. So does Jira and similar.