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Plan a project with linked tasks, see the critical path, and download a Gantt chart that redraws itself in Excel.
A Gantt chart is a project schedule drawn as horizontal bars across a calendar, one bar per task, positioned by start date and sized by duration. It shows sequence, overlap and the finish date in one picture rather than as a list of dates that has to be read and held in your head.
A dot marks the critical path. Those are the tasks where a slip moves the finish date, and the only ones where it does.
6 of 7 tasks are on the critical path, 42 days of work between them. The rest have slack, so a day lost on one of those costs the project nothing.
An .xlsx with the schedule and the chart on one sheet, because in a spreadsheet they are the same thing.
1. Gantt
The task table on the left and the timeline to the right, one column per day up to about four months and one per week beyond that. End dates are formulas, a dependent task start points at the task it follows, and the bars are drawn by conditional formatting so they move when you edit a date.
2. Summary
Project start, finish, calendar days, working days and percent complete, all as live formulas over the Gantt sheet, plus the critical path length and which weekend rule the plan was built on.
The bars are rules rather than colours. That is the difference between a chart and a picture of one: change a duration in the file and every task after it moves, with the chart following.
Excel
Double click the download. If Excel shows a yellow protected view bar, click Enable Editing so the formulas calculate.
Google Sheets
Upload it to Drive and open it, or use File then Import then Upload inside an existing sheet. Formatting and formulas both carry across.
Numbers on a Mac
Open it directly. Numbers converts the workbook and keeps the totals working, though the yellow header fill may shift slightly.
Formula
finish = start + duration, counted in working days · a dependent task starts the working day after its predecessor endsduration = how many working days the task takes, not how many calendar days it spans. A five day task over a weekend spans seven
dependency = finish to start, the only link type most plans need: this task begins once that one is done
critical path = the chain of dependent tasks that decides the finish date. A slip on it moves the project; a slip off it does not
float = how far a task can slip before it becomes critical. Tasks on the critical path have none, which is the definition
Worked Example
A five day task starting on a Thursday
Did you know? Henry Gantt published his charts around 1910, but he was not the first: Karol Adamiecki drew the same thing in Poland about fifteen years earlier and called it a harmonogram. He published in Polish and Russian, Gantt published in English, and the English name is the one that stuck.
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