Today I created my first Gantt Chart! I know, I know… I celebrated with a beer.
Actually, it wasn’t for me but it did make me realise that I ask students to consider them for their project management tasks and have never really created one myself. When I found out how to do them I realised they were not as easy to create as I first thought.
For the uninitiated, Gantt charts are a visual method of displaying the individual tasks of a project over the time it should take (or has taken) to achieve them. They are very useful in all project and time management planning as being visual, it becomes clear how you plan to (are) allocating your time:
Now, there is software that creates them easily but none that are free or as versatile as Microsoft Excel, so we’re going to use that. But sadly there isn’t a Gantt chart feature so how do you create them? I found this handy little video to get you started:
There is just one step the creator missed out, and it’s pretty vital so shame on him for not mentioning it. You must convert any cells you store dates in to the Date format. You do this by right clicking a cell (or range of cells) and selecting ‘Format Cells…’. Then, choose ‘Date’ from ‘Category” and set the ‘Type’ to your chosen way of expressing the date. Watch out for different date formats (such as the American format of placing the month before the date).
You can even automate the process slightly by only specifying the Start Date and the Number of Days and creating a very simple formula for the End Date:
=SUM([Start Date Cell],[Number of Days Cell])
This is especially useful for long tasks that span many days or months.
The beauty of using Excel to create your charts is that once they are set up, any changes are automatically taken into consideration and the chart is redrawn. Nice.