GANTT Team Project Chart Template

GANTT Team Project Chart Template for Excel

What is a Gantt Chart?

A Gantt chart excel template is not a common tool, but to put it in simple terms, a simple Gantt chart is a chart that has a visual view of the scheduled tasks over time. You can use a Gantt Excel chart to plan for projects of any size and use it to show the work schedule that needs to be done on a particular day. You can also use it to view the project’s timeline of the start and end dates in just one simple look.

Back in the day, people used to make plans on papers or with blocks that were colored. Before the application of the Gantt chart excel template, magnetic blocks were used together with Legos to plan tasks.

How to use the Gantt Chart template:

The Gantt chart excel template is a powerful and yet easy and painless tool to use when you want to manage your projects. Free excel project management tracking templates is great for PM’s looking to simplify their current process, or for managers looking for efficiency. You can use the Gantt chart to manage any kind of project, from website designing to construction projects and others.

The Gantt chart excel is already prepared for use, and you only need to plug and play your project tasks. We are going to see how tasks are set up, how to align dependencies of tasks, and how to automate timeframes and durations of tasks.

The great thing about the chart templates is that you can customize them to your liking.

How new tasks are set in excel chart templates:

You first of all need to rename the tasks to fit your project. The tasks are usually numbered by default and all you need to do is to click and rename any cell that is in the column named “Task Name.”

Update your task start and end dates:

When updating the start and end dates of your tasks within the chart templates, you can change them to any location and preference. The cells are normally pre-formatted using the standard US format date cells.

Automatic calculation of durations:

When it comes to each task’s duration, the timeframe is calculated automatically by the subtraction operation between the start date and the end date. When you enter your start and end dates, the column of duration will be populated automatically. By default, the duration is calculated in days.

How to customize your Excel Gantt chart template:

Adding a chart title in excel chart templates:

• To add a chart title, highlight the chart and at the top of the Excel chart templates Menu, click on the ‘Chart Design.’
• Click on ‘Add Chart Element’/ Chart Title/ Above Chart
• Write the title you need for your chart. You can format the text if you want from the home menu just like any other worksheet text.

Changing colors of your taskbar within the Gantt chart excel:

To make the chart look pretty, click twice on a single bar. Just click it, but don’t double-click it. The click will highlight the bars in the Gantt excel chart and then another click will just highlight the taskbar. Right click the bar and go for “format data point.”

Choose the paint bucket and select taskbar color. Repeat the process for other taskbars you need to change.

Print your Gantt chart excel:

• To print a simple Gantt chart, first, highlight the print area. Click a cell behind the corner of the Gantt chart and make a selection that covers the entire area you want to print.
• Go to File/PrintArea/Set Print Area
• Once the print area is done, head to File/Print. Since the chart size varies, you will want to adjust the chart scale for it to fit one page, or you can alternatively have the chart spanning several pages and manually bind them together for a huge printout.
• If you want to print the whole workbook, go straight ahead to File/Print. You will also need to adjust the chart size.

Features of the Gantt Excel Chart Software:

Although Gantt charts are all different, there are quite a number of primary features that you need to take advantage of in a simple Gantt Excel chart for the maximum use of the chart templates.

Milestone: it has a diamond representation and it does not have a duration. A milestone use is to mark the end or a phase or a piece of work. Most of the times, they are fixed dates that are important enough to be tracked.

Link tasks: they are represented by lines and the arrow points to the task that is coming next. Dependencies take different forms: start to finish, start to start, finish to finish or finish to start.

Summary tasks: it helps to group tasks especially if they are part of a phase of a project. You can hide the tasks so that the summary task is what can be seen.

Collaborate: it helps for your team to comment and chat around certain tasks to document the workflow. Each time a task is updated, your team will get an update for them to know the activity that has been done.

File sharing: this feature allows you to attach videos, images, notes and even files to keep all; the information together.

Task progress: this is represented in several ways. When there is shading on the sidebar, it indicates the completion progress of the task. The task is finished when the entire bar is shaded.

Optional tips:

A simple Gantt chart can either be on the desktop or it can be hosted online. There are people who are apprehensive on the use of the online version, but you need to know that most companies offer encryption security that is in the same standard as banks for online project management software. There are also plans in place to ensure that the data is secure and can be recovered.

If you want to link tasks to issues and risks, you are able to make it easy to navigate the software and make highlights of potential problems that may require your attention. You can have columns that display risks and tasks with a click.

You can import lists of Excel tasks to online tools for it to populate the online Gantt chart template instantly. To accomplish this task, you need to import simple lists of tasks, MS Project files, Excel files or CSV files. To make it even simpler, match the columns in the file you want to import to the target files. You can do this with the help of the software.

In summary, if you want to be comfortable using a Gantt chart example, create a Gantt chart example by coming with a project in the software and play around with it. Use different settings to see the columns that will give you the details you want. If you want to try a new feature, the test project file of the Gantt chart example is great for you to use before you apply it to the production work.