Project Timeline in Excel (Table of Contents)
Introduction to Project Timeline in Excel
How many times you have been in a situation when you have to mention the list of task in your project along with the duration it takes to complete those tasks? If you are a working professional, you frequently may have come up with a situation like this. And it is really a very tedious job to make this schedule and stick to it. This is also known as project timeline. Project timeline is nothing but the list of tasks you are scheduled to do within given time bounds. It contains a list of tasks, start time and end time. There is an easy way to represent project timeline in excel, through graphical representation. In excel we have “Gantt Chart” which can be helpful in making project timelines.
Gantt Chart is a type of bar chart (uses stack bar graphs to create Gantt Chart) in excel and is named after the person who invented it, Henry Laurence Gantt. As already discussed it is most useful in Project Management.
There are two ways in which we can create Project Timeline in excel.
- By using stack bar charts and then convert those into Gantt Chart.
- By using inbuilt excel Gantt Project Timeline/Project Planner template.
How to Use Project Timeline in Excel?
Project Timeline in Excel is very simple and easy. Let’s understand how to use the Project Timeline in Excel with some examples.
Example #1 – Project Timeline Using Stack Bar Graphs
Suppose you have a list of tasks in tabular form in excel as it shows in the screenshot below:
In this table, we have Task Name, Start Date of the task, End Date of the task and duration (in a number of days) it takes to complete the task. The duration can be inputted manually or you can use a formula as [End Date – Start Date + 1]. Here +1 allows excel to count the Start Date as well while calculating the Duration.
- Go to Excel Ribbon > Click Insert > Select Insert Column or Bar Chart option.
- Select Stacked Bar under 2D-Bar option.
- As soon as you click on that chart button, you can see an empty excel chart is generated as follows. Right click on it and choose select Data.
- A Select Data Source popping window will appear. Under Legend Entries (Series), click on Add tab.
- A new pop up window Edit Series will appear on the front. Under Series name, select Start Date (cell B1). Under Series values, select a range of data from the Start Date column (Column B, B2:B11). Click OK.
- Now add Duration as a Series name and Duration values as Series values by clicking Add button one more time same as an above step.
- Now, click Edit under Horizontal (Category) Axis Labels. It will open up a new pop up window Axis Labels. Select Task Name Range of cells from cell A2 to A11 under Axis label range and click OK. It will add Project 1 to Project 10 as label (name) to every stack.
You can see a stacked bar chart as shown below with start date as labels on X-Axis, Duration as Value for stacks and Task Name as labels for Y-Axis.
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Now, there are these blue bars which are nothing but the start date bars. We don’t want those in our timeline graph. Therefore, we need to remove those.
- Select blue bars and right click on those to select Format Data Series.
- Under Format Data Series, select No Fill under Fill section and No Line under Border section to make the blue bars invisible.
Now, the graph looks like below:
- Change the Minimum bound of this graph using Format Axis pane to remove the white space at the start of the graph. Ideally, you can put the minimum bound as equals to the value of the first date in the Start Date column.
- Now, remove spaces within each timeline to make it look nicer. Under SERIES OPTIONS in Format Data Series, set Series Overlap to 100% and Gap Width as 10% for Plot Series.
- Now, try to reverse the project order so that Project 1 appears as first and Project 10 as of last.
Using Format Axis on Y-Axis, check Categories in reverse order option under Axis Options to make this graph look in chronological order.
Your timeline chart looks like the one in below screenshot.
This is how we can create a timeline chart using stack bars.
Example 2- In-built Gantt Project Planning Template
Let’s see Project Timeline using Excel In Built Gantt project template. As you all know, excel is well known for its simplicity. There are more simple ways in recent versions of excel which has a separate template for Gantt Project Planning. You can directly use it and give your data inputs to have a Gantt Visualization. It reduces steps we covered in the first example and apparently is a time saver.
- Go to File Menu and Click New tab on the ribbon placed vertically on the left-hand side.
- In Search Box, type Gantt Project Planner and hit the search button to search the template dedicated for Project Planning.
- You can double click the template to get opened and fill the details as per header which reflects a change in horizontal bars placed there.
This is it from this article where we learned how to create a graphical project timeline in excel. Let’s wrap the things up with some points to be remembered.
Things to Remember
- Project Timeline chart is also called as Gantt Chart which has been developed by Henry Laurence Gantt. Gantt chart is specially developed for project timeline management purpose.
- Horizontal bars on Gantt chart represent the duration (In a number of days or in time) it takes to complete any particular activity or project.
- This chart doesn’t provide more detailed information about the project. It only shows the duration it takes to complete the task and whether the task is on the duration or not. It doesn’t provide any real-time monitoring on the project/task.
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