How to create a “half decent” Gantt Chart in Excel

I’ve always thought that Excel was a great tool for planning simple projects.  I’ve coloured in cells and even created formulae and conditional formatting to colour in bars to represent activity durations.

But, I’ve just learnt how to use Stacked Bar Charts to create a Gantt Chart that looks more than half decent.  I’ve even managed to customise it to show duration bars in one colour and milestones (zero duration) in a different colour.

A Gantt Chart in Excel (using Stacked Bar Charts)

You can download my demo spreadsheet here and a new fully automated version (2014). If you need help e-mail me.

You can learn the basics here:

And, from Microsoft here.