Charts and Graphs, Featured, Learn Excel

Gantt Charts – Project Management Using Excel [Part 1 of 6]

Last updated on October 2, 2019

Chandoo

Starting this week we are starting a new series of posts on project management using Microsoft excel. I have been working in various projects in the last 6 years and almost in all cases we have been using excel to manage, measure and track various aspects of project. These posts represent few of the things related to project management using excel that I have learned over the years.

Part 1: Preparing & tracking a project plan using Gantt Charts
Team To Do Lists – Project Tracking Tools
Project Status Reporting – Create a Timeline to display milestones
Time sheets and Resource management
Issue Trackers & Risk Management
Project Status Reporting – Dashboard
Bonus Post: Using Burn Down Charts to Understand Project Progress

Excel, because of its grid nature provides a great way to prepare and manage project plans. In this part of the project management using Microsoft excel series we will learn how to prepare and track a project plan using gantt chart in excel.

Preparing a project plan

Not all project plans are same. But most of the project plans have a list of,

All activities / phases of project
Planned start date of the activity
Planned duration of the activity

From tracking perspective, we can add the following,

Actual start date of the activity
Actual duration of the activity
% of the activity completed as of date

As you can see, excel provides a great way to manage such plan. Look at an example project plan made in excel.

But the above plan is more or less static. Using Excel’s features we can make a dynamic gantt chart that can,

Update the Gantt chart when dates change
Display a separate bar that will grow based on the % completion of each activity
Highlight current week / day in a subtle way

In essence, we will create something like this:

Steps for preparing an Gantt Chart

First make the above layout in a new excel sheet
Then we will add several columns in the end, one for each day (or week or month) of the project
We will also designate 3 cells say $N$5, $Y$5, $AL$5 where we will maintain the following values,
1. In cell $N$5, a selection option that will change the plan between “planned” and “actual” dates
2. In cell $Y$5, a symbol that we can use to display finished portion of work
3. In cell $AL$5, where we can enter the current week (or day or month)
Now we will do some conditional formatting (ahem!) that will highlight a particular cell in the grid,
1. If $N$5 has “Planned” and cell is between planned date and planned date + planned duration
2. Else, cell is between actual date and actual date + actual duration
We will also write formulas in all the cells (same formula pasted over the entire range) which displays a symbol like solid rectangle. For finding out if we should fill in the symbol or not, we use the % completed column of the gantt chart. Figuring out this formula is part of your home work. 😉
Finally we will adjust formatting like column widths, fonts, colors etc. and freeze top row so that it is easy to scroll and still know what you are looking at.