Advanced Gantt Charts in Spreadsheet

Gantt Chart is useful. It tracks tasks start and finish dates, dependencies and resources. Unfortunately drawing gantt chart usually requires a project management software. Alternative? Peltier Technical Services shows a way of doing it in Spreadsheet (i.e. Excel):

Gantt charts are useful tools in program management, which help to show graphically when tasks must start and finish, and which tasks are underway at any given time. Gantt charts help in scheduling of the many tasks in a program, and in identifying potential resource issues in the schedule. A simple Gantt chart is merely a floating bar chart, that is, a stacked bar chart in which the first series is formatted to be invisible. The second series of bars are stacked on the first, but these bars appear to float in the middle of the chart, because the first series is formatted to be invisible. My article Gantt Charts in Microsoft Excel in Tech Trax e-zine describes this simple approach.

This example is more detailed, and therefore more complicated. There are two visible bars, so the floating bar can show fraction complete and fraction incomplete. In addition, two line chart series are added to show milestones for completed and not-yet-completed tasks. Excel will not allow an XY series to be added to a Bar-Line combination chart, so an additional line series is used as an anchor for a vertical line and label. Using a line chart allows us to use the versatile time scale axis of the line chart as the horizontal axis of the Gantt chart.

I am not sure about you, but I feel this is a pretty cool way to generate gantt chart, without open up your wallet to purchase a project management application.

Advanced Gantt Charts in Microsoft Excel - [Peltier Technical Services]