Make A Gantt Chart Excel Download Advanced Gantt

This short tutorial will explain the key features of the Gantt diagram, show how to make a simple Gantt chart in Excel, where to download advanced Gantt chart templates and how to use the online Project Management Gantt Chart creator.

A Gantt diagram in Excel represents projects or tasks in the form of cascading horizontal bar charts.

However, you can quickly create a Gantt chart in Excel by using the bar graph functionality and a bit of formatting.

We will be using Excel 2010 for this Gantt chart example, but you can simulate Gantt diagrams in Excel 2019, 2016 and Excel 2013 exactly in the same way.

List each task is a separate row and structure your project plan by including the Start date, End date and Duration, i.e.

If you have Start Dates and End Dates, you can use this simple formula to calculate Duration: Duration End Date - Start Date.

Be sure to select only the cells with data, and not the entire column.

But I think the above approach is better because Microsoft Excel will add one data series to the chart automatically, and in this way save you some time.

As you can see in the screenshot below, Start Date is already added under Legend Entries (Series).

Alternatively, you can place the mouse cursor into this field and click the column header in your spreadsheet, the clicked header will be added as the Series name for the Gantt chart.

Select your project Duration data by clicking on the first Duration cell (D2 in our case) and dragging the mouse down to the last duration (D11).

Make sure you have not mistakenly included the header or any empty cell.

This will bring you back to the previous Edit Series window with Series name and Series values filled in, where you click OK.

Simply click OK for the Duration data to be added to your Excel chart.

When done, exit the window by clicking on the range selection icon again.

You have to add the proper formatting to make it look more like a Gantt chart.

Our goal is to remove the blue bars so that only the orange parts representing the projects tasks will be visible.

In technical terms, we wont really delete the blue bars, but rather make them transparent and therefore invisible.

Select the Categories in reverse order option under Axis Options and then click the Close button to save all the changes.

Now you can remove that blank white space to bring your tasks a little closer to the left vertical axis.

Write down the number that you see - this is a numeric representation of the date, in my case 41730.

As you probably know, Excel stores dates as numbers based on the number of days since 1-Jan-1900.

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