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Project Timeline in Excel

By Madhuri ThakurMadhuri Thakur

project timeline in excel

Project Timeline in Excel (Table of Contents)

  • Introduction to Project Timeline in Excel
  • How to Use Project Timeline in Excel?

Introduction to Project Timeline in Excel

How many times have you been in a situation when you have to mention the list of tasks 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 the 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 a project timeline in excel through graphical representation. In excel, we have a “Gantt Chart”, which can be helpful in making project timelines.

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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.

You can download this Project Timeline Excel Template here – Project Timeline Excel Template

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:

project timeline in excel 1

In this table, we have the Task Name, Start Date of the task, End Date of the task, and duration (in the 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.

project timeline in excel 2

  • Select Stacked Bar under 2D-Bar option.

project timeline in excel 4

  • 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.
Note: Sometimes, you may directly get a Stacked Bar Graph with data being automatically selected by excel itself. This happens when you have inserted data using an excel table layout.

project timeline in excel 5

  • A Select Data Source popping window will appear. Under Legend Entries (Series), click on Add tab.

project timeline in excel 6

  • 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.

project timeline in excel 3

  • Now add Duration as a Series name and Duration values as Series values by clicking Add button one more time, same as the above step.

project timeline in excel 4

  • 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 a label (name) to every stack.

project timeline in excel 5

project timeline in excel 6

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.

project in excel

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.

project in excel 1

  • Under Format Data Series, select No Fill under Fill section and No Line under Border section to make the blue bars invisible.

format data series

Now, the graph looks like below:

graph

  • Change the Minimum bound of this graph using the 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.

format axis

  • 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.

SERIES OPTIONS

  • 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.

format axis

Your timeline chart looks like the one in the below screenshot.

timeline chart

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 have a separate template for Gantt Project Planning. You can directly use it and give your data inputs to have a Gantt Visualization. It reduces the steps we covered in the first example and apparently is a time saver.

  • Go to File Menu and Click the 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.

Gantt Project Planning Template 1

  • You can double click the template to get opened and fill in the details as per the header, which reflects a change in horizontal bars placed there.

Gantt Project Planning Template 2

This is it from this article where we learned how to create a graphical project timeline in excel. Let’s wrap things up with some points to be remembered.

Things to Remember 

  • Project Timeline chart is also called as Gantt Chart, which Henry Laurence Gantt has developed. Gantt chart is specially developed for project timeline management purposes.
  • Horizontal bars on the 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 of the project/task.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Project Timeline in Excel. Here we discuss how to use Project Timeline in Excel along with practical examples and a downloadable excel template. You can also go through our other suggested articles –

  1. Timeline in Excel
  2. Project Management Template in Excel
  3. Time Difference in Excel
  4. Timecard Template in Excel
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