The Gantt chart is a very helpful and popular tool in the field of project management. For a more in-depth look on how useful this device can be, see Joe Taylor’s article Top Ten Benefits of a Gantt Chart. This tutorial on how to make a Gantt chart was created using Microsoft Excel 2007.
The first thing you want to do in preparation for creating a Gantt chart in Excel is to input the project timeline data into a spreadsheet. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ve created a sample file with project data that can be downloaded from the Media Gallery. Additionally, Figure 1 in the image gallery How to Make a Gantt Chart in Excel Screenshots that is found at the end of this article shows the table created for this example. As with any of the other images in this tutorial, you can click on it to see a larger view.
We will use the stacked bar chart option in Excel to create our Gantt chart. First, as shown in Figure 2, hold down the Ctrl-key and select the columns that contain the Task, Start Date, Days Completed, and Days Remaining Data. Next, navigate to the Insert screen of Excel and choose the option to insert a stacked bar chart. You’ll end up with an image like that shown in Figure 3. This isn’t at all what we want as a final version, but we now have a representation that contains our basic information that we can modify to reach our desired appearance.
First we want to make sure that the tasks on the chart are listed in chronological order from oldest to newest. To do this, right-click over any of the task names and choose Format Axis from the dialog box. Check the box in front of the option “Categories in reverse order” and then close the window. This process is shown in Figure 4.
Now we want to remove the Start Date as one of our series items. Right-click on one of the segments representing the Start Date field and choose Format Data Series. Pick “No Fill” for the Fill option and “No Line” for Border Color. See Figure 5.
Next we want to override the automatic dates that Excel has picked for our chart and use the minimum and maximum dates related to our specific project. Before we do this, we need to determine the serial numbers that are assigned to these dates in Excel.
On a “scrap” worksheet, we will enter the dates that we want to use. In this case, the dates are 12/15/07 and 12/31/08. Select the cells containing the dates and choose the Format Cells option. From the Category list, choose Number and then click OK. We obtain 39431 and 39813 as our corresponding minimum and maximum values. The screenshot in Figure 6 refers to this step. The file that accompanies this tutorial in the Media Gallery contains a worksheet that will make this calculation for any date that you choose to enter. Feel free to download this file to use for later projects.
Return to your stacked bar chart and right-click on the Start Date axis. Under Axis Options, enter 39431 for Minimum, 39813 for Maximum, 91 for Major Unit, and 1 for Minor Unit. Entering 91 for the major unit allows the chart to be divided into blocks that represent about 3 months. The minor unit of 1 represents a single day. See the screenshot labeled Figure 7.
Now you can lean back and take a little break. We’re all done and the resulting Gantt chart can be viewed in Figure 8.