Creating your first chart

Gantt Excel is an Excel workbook, not a separate program. You open it the way you open any other .xlsm file, and everything happens on ordinary worksheets — which is the point: your plan stays a spreadsheet you own, that anyone with Excel can open. Throughout these guides we build the same example, the Oakfield Villa build, so you can follow one project from its first task all the way to a printed report. Where a guide is about planning in hours rather than days, it switches to a second example — a kitchen refit — because a house is not scheduled by the hour and the picture should not pretend otherwise.

01 Enable macros first

Every calculation in Gantt Excel — the schedule, the bars, the roll-ups — is written in VBA, and Excel blocks that code by default. Open the workbook, click Enable Content on the yellow bar under the ribbon, and you are done; Excel remembers the file after that.

If there is no yellow bar, or the Gantt Excel tab never appears, Enabling macros in Excel has the fix — both platforms, the blocked-file case, and a ribbon tab that is missing or unresponsive.

02 Opening the New Project dialog

With macros running, the Gantt Excel tab appears on the ribbon, to the left of Home. Everything in the product is reached from there.

That is the whole creation flow. There is no wizard and no second page — one dialog produces a finished, formatted chart sheet with a timeline already drawn on it.

03 Days or Hours — decide before you click OK

The Duration box on the dialog offers two values, Days and Hours. This is not a zoom level or a display preference. It decides which of two different scheduling engines your chart uses, and it is fixed for the life of the chart.

A chart’s view is a separate matter, and this is the distinction that catches people out. An hourly chart can be displayed in a daily view, and a daily chart can be shown weekly, monthly or quarterly — those are all just ways of drawing the timeline, and you switch between them freely under Gantt Excel → Views and Timeline. What you are choosing here is the kind of chart underneath, which no view setting changes. The hourly planning guide covers the hourly engine in full.

04 Filling in the dialog

Here is the whole New Project dialog. Hover or tap a pin for what each part does; the numbered key below lists them all.

1Project Name. The heading shown across the top of the chart. 2Worksheet Name. The Excel tab name — 31 characters, no ? \ / * [ ] : 3Project Lead. Who owns the plan. Shown under the project name. 4Duration. Days or Hours — the chart kind, fixed at creation. 5Language. This project’s own language, set per chart. 6Enable Costs. Untick to hide the money side entirely. 7Budget Details. Baseline and Estimated budget for the whole project. 8Import Gantt Chart. Brings a chart in from another workbook instead.

1. Project Name. The heading shown across the top of the chart sheet. Free text — spaces and punctuation are fine.
2. Worksheet Name. The name on the Excel tab. Excel’s own rules apply: 31 characters maximum, and no ? \ / * [ ] : — those are stripped as you type or paste.
3. Project Lead. Who owns the plan. Written into the header rows just under the project name.
4. Duration. Days or Hours — the kind of chart, fixed at creation. See section 03.
5. Language. The language for this project’s labels and messages, stored per chart rather than per workbook.
6. Enable Costs. Ticked by default. Untick it and the budget fields grey out and the money row is left blank.
7. Budget Details. Baseline Budget and Estimated Budget for the project as a whole.
8. Import Gantt Chart. Leaves this dialog and starts the import flow instead — for bringing a chart in from another Gantt Excel workbook. It asks Import a project from another Gantt Excel workbook. Continue? before it goes anywhere; answering No closes the dialog without creating anything.

Worked example — the villa build

Budgets are reformatted with separators and two decimals when you leave the field, so 370000 reads back as 370,000.00. You can type the thousands separators yourself if you prefer — 370,000.00 is read as three hundred and seventy thousand — but they are not needed. The box accepts digits, your separators and nothing else, so a currency symbol cannot be typed in; if you paste one, it is stripped before the number is read.

05 What you get

Click OK and a new sheet appears, already formatted, with a timeline drawn across it. Reading down the left of the sheet:

• The project name sits in a white card at the top, with the name itself in the project colour. Click the card to reopen Edit Project.
• The project lead is on the line beneath it, and the budget line under that when costs are enabled.
• The column headers — Task, Priority, Status, the date columns, % Complete, Resources and the rest — sit on the row directly above the first task.
• One starter task is already there, named Type here or double-click to edit in form. at Priority Normal, Status Not Started and 0% complete. On a daily chart it starts today — or the next working day, if today is a weekend or a holiday — and runs for 1 day; on an hourly chart it starts today at the organisation’s shift-start time and runs for 6 hours.
• A grey italic placeholder row underneath it reading Type here to add a new task. That row is how you add tasks by typing.

Two more sheets are created at the same time and hidden, one holding this project’s settings and one holding its resources. You never edit them by hand — the Settings dialog and the Resources dialog are how you reach what is in them. The resource list starts with a single Organization calendar working 09:00–18:00, Monday to Friday, which is what every task schedules against until you assign someone.

06 Adding your first tasks

There are two ways in, and they suit different moments.

Type straight into the sheet. Click the starter task’s name, type over it, and press Enter. Then click the grey Type here to add a new task row and type the next one. This is the fastest way to get a list of tasks down while you are still thinking, and Gantt Excel fills in sensible dates as you go — you can fix them afterwards.

Use the form. Gantt Excel → Tasks → Add Task opens the Task Form on a new row, where you can set the name, dates, duration, resource and progress in one pass. Double-clicking any existing task row opens the same form on that task. The whole form is covered in The Task Form.

For the villa build, the first three tasks look like this on a Monday–Friday working week:

Note the second row: six days from Wednesday 1 July lands on Wednesday 8 July, not Monday 6 July, because the weekend is not counted. That is the calendar doing its job — you supply a start and a duration, and Gantt Excel works out the end date around non-working days. The Resources guide explains how to change those working days and add holidays.

07 Changing the project details later

The name, lead, budgets and language are all editable after the fact. Either click the project name banner at the top of the sheet, or use Gantt Excel → Gantt Charts → Edit Project. The same dialog reopens, this time titled Edit Project Details, holding the project’s current values.

Two things behave differently in edit mode. Duration is locked, for the reason in section 03. And the Worksheet Name box now renames the existing sheet rather than creating one — type a new name, click OK, and the Excel tab is renamed, subject to the same length and character rules. Its label is greyed and the box is tinted to the form colour, which makes it look read-only; it is not, and typing in it works.

08 Where to go next

You now have a chart with tasks on it. The natural order from here:

• The Gantt Excel tab & your chart sheet — what every ribbon button and every column is for.
• The Task Form — the one place you edit everything about a task.
• Summary tasks, indenting & the WBS — turning a flat list into phases.
• Linking tasks with dependencies — so moving one task moves the ones that follow it.
• Resources, calendars & working days — who does the work, and which days they work.

09 Common questions

Related: The Gantt Excel tab & your chart sheet · Adding, editing & deleting tasks · Planning by the hour