New in this release · Critical path · Schedule to the minute
The Gantt chart that lives inside Excel.
A free Gantt chart Excel template that actually schedules. Add tasks, link them, and the plan maintains itself — dates move when something slips, the critical path recalculates, and progress rolls up on its own. No subscription, no new tool to learn: it all happens inside the Excel you already have.
- ★★★★★ 4.9/5 · 144 reviews
- 8,960,000+ downloads
- Windows & Mac
- 11 languages
What you get
A real project planner, in a file you already know how to open
It stays on your computer. Anyone you send it to can open it. Nothing to log into.
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Dependencies that actually schedule
Link tasks once. Move one date and everything downstream moves with it — no dragging bars, no re-typing.
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Critical path & float
See the chain that decides your finish date, and exactly how much room every other task has.
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Hours to years
Seven views, one click apart — and hourly charts that schedule to the nearest whole minute.
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Baselines & actuals
Compare the original plan, today's estimate and what really happened, side by side.
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Resources & costs
Assign people, set each one's working calendar, and track budget in the same sheet.
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Dashboard & export
One click to a dashboard, a web report, or a PDF for people who don't live in Excel.
The ribbon
Everything lives in one Excel tab
Gantt Excel adds a single Gantt Excel tab to the ribbon you already use. Build the chart, add tasks and milestones, switch views, assign resources and export — without ever leaving the spreadsheet.
Try it yourself
Interactive demo — take the guided tour below
Explore a real project below. Hover any task, milestone or numbered marker to see what Gantt Excel does — dependencies, the critical path, budgets, resources and live dates, all built right into your spreadsheet.
Gantt Excel allows you to visualize and track every step of your project, from start to finish.
You can create tasks, link them using dependencies, and then track their progress against deadlines and milestones.
Auto-scheduling
Change one date. The rest follows.
This is the difference between a Gantt chart and a picture of one.
- Finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish and start-to-finish links
- Lag and lead time on any link
- Summary tasks roll up their children automatically
- Working calendars respected per resource, so weekends and holidays don't lie to you
Critical path
Know which tasks you can’t afford to slip
Switch on Show Critical Path and every task with no room left gets a red outline. Everything else gets a number telling you exactly how much room it has — so you know where to push, and where you can afford to wait.
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Five columns, not a colour
Turning it on adds five read-only columns: Late Start, Late Finish, Total Float, Free Slack and Critical. The two above are the ones you’ll read most — how much room a task has, and whether it has any at all.
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One rule, no mystery
A task is critical when its Total Float is zero. That’s the whole rule — nothing is hidden in a black box you have to take on trust.
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Arrows that mean something
Dependency arrows turn red only when both linked tasks are critical. An arrow running into a task that still has float keeps its normal colour.
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Float you can believe
Float is measured against each resource’s own working calendar. A gap that looks like breathing room counts for nothing if those aren’t working days.
Dashboards
One click turns the plan into a status report
Press Dashboard and pick your format: a standalone web page you can send to anyone, or a dashboard built inside the workbook. Both read the plan you already have. Neither needs setting up.
A single HTML file. It opens in any browser, on any machine, with nothing installed and no account to create — and it carries the cost summary, resource load and milestone list that will never fit on a Gantt chart.
Built inside the workbook, with live slicers for status, priority and resource. Filter it and every chart follows. It never leaves the file.
Plan and track
The plan you promised, next to what actually happened
Save a baseline once. From then on the chart carries three sets of dates at the same time — what you committed to, what you now expect, and what really happened. The slippage is something you can see, not something you reconstruct from memory.
- Baseline — what you committed to
- Estimated — what you expect now
- Actual — what really happened
- Milestone
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Save it once
Set the baseline when the plan is agreed. Everything after that is measured against it, so nobody has to remember what the original date was.
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Three bars, one row
Baseline, estimate and actual sit on the same line. A task that slipped looks like a task that slipped — you don’t have to read a variance column to notice.
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Milestones you can defend
Mark the dates that matter and watch them move, or hold. Build a milestone-only chart for the people who need the headlines and not the detail.
Languages
Gantt Excel speaks eleven languages
Change it in Settings and the whole interface follows — ribbon, tooltips, dialogs, column headers, dropdowns. Your project stays as you wrote it: task names, notes and resource names are never translated.
- English
- Español (España)
- Español (Latinoamérica)
- Français
- Português (Portugal)
- Português (Brasil)
- Deutsch
- Nederlands
- Italiano
- 日本語
- 简体中文
Learn
Everything about Gantt charts
Guides written over ten years of answering the same questions. Start wherever you are.