What is the best way to build a project?

One of my issues is trying to get out of the Excel mindset when I'm setting up a sheet. It seems like I always want to do it backwards (rows vs. columns). We have a project template we are building so that we can duplicate it easily for additional jobs. It's our first project like this and so I'm struggling with making sure that everything we need is on there and that it will collect the data we need. Are there resources I can use to specifically help us build this project.