#Excel gantt project planner how to#

We use File > Options > Advanced > Display: This hides the lines that demarcate the cell edges. It’s a minor point but, to give a cleaner appearance, “Show Gridlines” has been switched off. It uses cell shading (done with clever conditional formatting), not an Excel chart. The one we downloaded is better in several aspects, so you can ask us to email it to you. Now that link instead goes to a general list of templates (some of which are Gantt Charts). We then downloaded the sample Gantt Chart from the link on that page. A Gantt Chart in Excel using Cell Shadingįor a more complicated version, we went to this article at Microsoft Support. But there are some features of Gantt charts that it does not do well, or at all.įor greater sophistication, we have to move away from Excel’s charts, and use other methods: 3.

#Excel gantt project planner how to#

This article on demonstrates in detail how to use an Excel stacked bar chart for this. There are already some excellent resources: The good news is that, to create a Gantt Chart in Excel, you do not have to start from scratch. You might look at a dedicated project planning program, like Microsoft Project, instead. It requires a lot of work to create from scratch. The bad news is that, while a Gantt chart is a variety of bar chart, it is not in Excel’s standard charts. Creating a Gantt Chart in Excel using a Bar Chart

Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationships between activities and the current schedule status. It was designed and popularized by Henry Gantt around the years 1910–1915. The width of the horizontal bars in the graph shows the duration of each activity. Time intervals are on the horizontal axis. This chart lists the project’s tasks on the vertical axis. A Gantt chart is a bar chart that illustrates a project schedule.