How to Create Gantt Charts in Microsoft Excel

Gantt charts are a popular way to keep track of projects, especially for teams that need to keep the duration of a task in mind. By using a Gantt chart effectively, you can make sure different tasks don’t interfere with each other, and even determine when one should finish so another can start.

There are several ways to make Gantt charts, but in this article we’ll show you how to make one in a program that you probably have available: Microsoft Excel. Though it probably won’t outdo custom-made software when managing a large number of tasks, for small projects it’s a perfectly good alternative.

How to Create Gantt Charts in Microsoft Excel

The nice thing about creating a Gantt chart in Excel is that you probably already own a copy of the spreadsheet and know how to use it. If not, we recommend you check out ourExcel tutorial. Most recent versions of Microsoft Excel (we’re using Office Online for this guide, though you can also getOffice 365 for free) have a Gantt template included, so let’s take a quick look at that before we show you how to make your own.

Before starting to build a chart from scratch, please note that there’s a Gantt template included in Excel. If you’re using Office Online, it’s one of the available Workbooks in Excel’s home screen

The Gantt chart template is pretty good. You can enter your data in a table, which then automatically exports the data into an inverted bar chart. We recommend messing with it a bit to see what’s possible with Excel Gantt charts. However, the template is a bit inflexible, so if it doesn’t work for you then you’ll have to build your Gantt charts from scratch.

If you want, you could also add an end date in column C, thensubtract the dates automaticallyand have the resulting duration be displayed in column D. However, just for purposes of setting up the Gantt chart, the start date and the duration is enough.

With that, your Gantt chart is all done. The orange boxes (you can recolor them using the fill command if you want) show when a certain task is being worked on.

Gantt Charts in Excel

That should be enough to get you started with making your own Gantt charts. Though the templates that Excel offers — not to mention tailor-made project management software — are probably a better option if you plan to manage many tasks, using a homebrew option like above might be better if you’re keeping track of a small number of tasks or want to add some easy flavor to presentations.

Fergus is a freelance journalist who likes to write about cybersecurity and online software. He studied history, but don’t hold that against him as he is a techie at heart. After university, he taught history and English in a few exotic locales before becoming a newspaperman in the Far East. Nowadays he keeps an eye on the European tech scene from his perch in Cyprus.Read Fergus’s Full Bio

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