Documentation / Scheduling / Planning by the hour

Planning by the hour

Some projects are measured in days; some are measured in the hours of a single shift. This page explains what an hourly chart is, how it differs from a daily one, and the handful of rules that only apply when you plan at this grain.

A kitchen refit runs for weeks, so its chart is measured in days. But the fitting day itself — units at 08:00, worktops after lunch, plumber at 15:00 — is a project of its own, and days are far too coarse a unit to plan it in. That is what an hourly chart is for.

01 An hourly chart is a kind of chart, not a view

This is the single most important thing on the page, and it is where nearly all the confusion about hourly planning starts. Two separate settings sound similar and are not:

CHART KIND

“Is this project measured in days or in hours?”

Chosen once, in the Duration box of the New Project dialog, when the sheet is created. It decides whether durations mean days or hours, whether resources have working hours at all, and whether the scheduler counts calendar days or shift minutes.

It is permanent. Re-open the same dialog on an existing chart with Edit Project and the Duration box shows your choice greyed out — there is no conversion, in either direction.

VIEW

“How wide is one column on screen?”

The zoom level of the timeline — Hourly View, Daily View, or one of the wider ones under More Views. It changes only what you are looking at, never the data underneath, and you can switch it as often as you like.

An hourly chart opens in the Hourly View, but it doesn’t have to stay there. Switch it to Daily View and you get a perfectly ordinary daily timeline of the same hourly project.

So an hourly chart can be shown in a daily view — and when it is, it is drawn by the daily renderer, with a daily renderer’s rules. Everything later on this page that starts “in the Hourly View” is about the view, and stops applying the moment you zoom out. Everything that starts “on an hourly chart” is about the kind, and is true wherever you zoom.

02 Creating an hourly chart

Because the choice is permanent, it is worth a moment’s thought before you click. Three steps:

Gantt Excel → Gantt Charts → Add New Gantt Chart. The New Project dialog opens.

Set Duration to Hours. Leaving it on Days gives you an ordinary daily chart — the everyday choice, and the right one for anything measured in working days.

Fill in the project name, lead and budget as usual and click through. The new sheet arrives in the Hourly View, with a first task already on it.

One dropdown, one permanent decision: Days or Hours.

03 Durations in hours, and the 15-minute increment

On an hourly chart every duration field is read as hours rather than days — the Task Form labels the field Hours so there is no doubt. Durations may be fractional, and they are kept to the nearest whole minute, so 2.5 means two and a half hours and 1.25 means an hour and a quarter.

2.5 hours = 2 hours 30 minutes · 1.25 hours = 1 hour 15 minutes

Start and end dates carry a time of day as well as a date, and the date picker adds a time dropdown for it.

New hourly charts are created with a 15-minute planning increment, and it shows up in three places: the Resources form’s minute dropdowns step in quarter-hours (00, 15, 30, 45), duration cells display their decimals rather than being shown as whole numbers, and one increment is the smallest amount of progress a bar can show. Charts made before the increment existed plan in whole hours instead, and their minute dropdowns are hidden altogether — so if you only ever see 00 minutes, you are on an older sheet.

The date picker’s time dropdown is the one place those quarter-hours don’t reach. It lists whole hours only — 12 AM through to 11 PM, 24 entries — on a 15-minute chart exactly as on an older one, and picking from it sets the minutes to zero. So to start a task at 08:15, don’t use the picker: type the date and time straight into the date field on the Task Form. On an hourly chart those boxes show the time to the minute as well as the date, and they keep what you type.

04 Working hours, breaks and overnight shifts

A daily chart only asks which days a resource works. An hourly chart has to know which hours, so the Resources form shows a start time, an end time and a break — fields that are hidden on a daily chart because nothing there would use them. Open them from Gantt Excel → Resources → Resources.

Work Hours — the shift’s start and end time. Everything the scheduler does is clipped to this window.
Break (hrs) — a single unpaid break, entered in hours. Hover the box and its tooltip spells out the decimals: Break in hours. Use decimals for part-hours: 0.25 = 15 min, 0.5 = 30 min. It is subtracted from the shift and sits at the shift’s midpoint.
Work days and holidays — the same weekday mask and holiday list a daily chart uses. Both still apply; see Resources, calendars & working days.

Worked example — a fitter’s day

Your fitter works 08:00 to 16:30 with a 0.5 hour break, Monday to Friday. That is 8 hours 30 of shift less 30 minutes of break, so 8 working hours a day, split either side of a break that lands at 12:00–12:30.

Give “Fit kitchen units” a start of Monday 08:00 and a duration of 10 hours. Monday supplies 8 of them and stops at 16:30. The remaining 2 hours resume on Tuesday morning, so the task ends at Tuesday 10:00 — the evening, the night and the lunch break are all skipped, exactly as weekends are skipped on a daily chart.

Day	Working window	Hours used	Running total
Monday	08:00–12:00, 12:30–16:30	8 hours	8 of 10
Tuesday	08:00–10:00	2 hours	10 of 10 — finished

Overnight shifts

Set the end time earlier than the start time and you have described a shift that wraps past midnight — 22:00 to 06:00, say. Gantt Excel handles those, with one rule you need to know: a shift belongs to the day it starts on. A Friday night shift that clocks off at 06:00 on Saturday is Friday’s work, and Saturday being a non-working day has nothing to do with it.

Two edge cases are worth naming, because the form will stop you on both:

Start and end the same is not a 24-hour day, it is a zero-length one, and a resource with no working time cannot be scheduled. The genuine round-the-clock shift is 12 AM to 12 AM.
Nearly-24-hour shifts are usually a typo for an overnight one, and the form says so: The working day is too long. A resource can work at most {0} hours a day. If you meant an overnight shift, check the end time: an end time just before the start time creates an almost 24-hour day.

Start time, end time and break: the three fields that only exist on an hourly chart.

05 What an hourly chart draws

In the Hourly View each column is one hour, so a task that spans a night or a weekend cannot be one unbroken bar — there is nothing to draw in the hours nobody is working. Instead you get up to three layers:

An hourly chart: dates across the top of the timeline with the hours beneath, a task spanning overnight as two working-hour segments joined by a pale base bar, a part-shaded bar showing progress, and a milestone diamond. — Hover or tap a numbered pin to see what each part of an hourly bar is.

The base bar only appears when it has something to say — when the task starts before the shift opens, runs past its closing, spans more than one day, sits on a day its resource does not work at all, or runs off the end of the timeline you are currently looking at. That fourth case matters more than it sounds: a Saturday task on a Monday-to-Friday resource has no working hours for a segment to be drawn in, so without the base bar the row would paint nothing whatsoever — no bar, no task text, and nowhere for its dependency arrows to land. A task that fits neatly inside one day’s working hours is drawn as a single bar with nothing behind it, and a parent (summary) row never gets a base bar at all. The colour has its own swatch in Settings, labelled Base Bar (Hourly View).

Progress is measured in working hours too, which matters more than it sounds. A task running 06:00 to 17:00 for a resource who works 09:00 to 18:00 is 50% done at 13:00 — halfway through its 8 working hours — not at 11:30, which would be halfway through the elapsed time nobody was working for most of.

ℹ️The rows behind your bars are never shaded in an hourly view. No per-resource holiday colours, no alternating column stripes — the gaps between segments already say where the non-working time is, and shading it as well would say the same thing twice. Those tickboxes are disabled on an hourly chart rather than left to do nothing, and your choices are kept for when you switch to another view. The two organisation-level ones, Highlight Holidays and Highlight Work Off Days, are the exception: they stay enabled and still work, because they colour the date row in the timeline header rather than the task rows.

06 No Baseline or Actual bars

This one surprises people, so it is stated plainly: the Hourly View draws the Estimated bar only. There are no Baseline bars and no Actual bars on it. Open Settings while an hourly view is on screen and you will find Show Baseline Bars and Show Actual Bars greyed out, with their colour swatches hidden.

It is easy to expect otherwise, because the three bands are all still there. The Task Form still has its Estimated, Baseline and Actual dates; you can still record them, still compare them, still report on them. The tracking is intact — it is only the drawing of the second and third bars that an hourly view leaves out.

The reason is space. At one column per hour, a three-deep stack of bars on every row would leave a chart you cannot read, on the very view whose whole point is fine detail. The three bands reappear the moment you switch that same chart to Daily View, where a day is one column and there is room for them.

07 Cell fills or shapes

Hourly bars can be drawn two ways, and one tickbox in Settings chooses between them: Hourly View – Shapes Based.

Setting	How bars are drawn	Best for
Off (the default)	By colouring the hour cells themselves. A bar always fills whole cells.	Everyday use — faster, and crisp at any zoom.
On	As floating shapes above the grid, which can stop part-way through a cell.	Fine-grained plans where a bar needs to end at 10:20, not at the top of the hour.

The honest difference is what happens to something shorter than an hour. A 9-minute task cannot be drawn as 15% of a cell, so with the setting off it is painted as one full cell and reads as an hour on screen — visible and clickable, which beats drawing nothing at all. With the setting on it is drawn at its true width, floored at a minimum so it never disappears. Neither is a bug; they are two answers to a question that has no perfect one.

Progress shading follows the same logic. Cell fills count whole completed columns, so a long task at 95% can show as finished; shapes split the cell and show the 95%.

The same task, drawn both ways: whole cells above, fractional shape edges below.

08 What works differently in the Hourly View

Almost everything behaves as it does anywhere else. Three things do not, and all three are properties of the view — zoom out to Daily View and they revert:

Bars cannot be dragged. Try to move, resize or link a bar by dragging and it snaps back with Bars can’t be moved or linked in the Hourly View. Use the Task Form to change dates. Open the task instead and type the dates — an hour column is far too narrow to drop a bar on accurately, and a silent snap-back with no explanation would read as a bug.
Dependencies are created in the form, not on the chart. Same reason. The links themselves work exactly as they do on a daily chart, lags and all — see Linking tasks with dependencies.
Baseline and Actual bars are not drawn, as covered in section 06.

Everything else is ordinary: indenting and summary tasks, the critical path, grouping, filters, the dashboard, the web report and both exports all work on an hourly chart in the usual way. The critical path is a good example of how little changes — it runs exactly the same calculation, simply measuring float in working hours instead of working days, which is also the unit the web report labels it with.

09 Common questions

Can I convert a daily chart into an hourly one?

No. The choice is made in the Duration box when the sheet is created and the box is disabled ever afterwards, so there is no conversion in either direction. Create a new chart of the right kind and re-enter the tasks. It is worth deciding deliberately at the start: pick Hours only when you genuinely need to plan inside a working day.

Where has the Hourly View button gone?

You are on a daily chart. The Hourly View button under Gantt Excel → Views and Timeline hides itself unless the sheet is an hourly chart, because an hourly zoom on a chart with no times in it would show you nothing useful. Every other view — Daily View and the ones under More Views — is available on both kinds.

Why does my task have a gap in the middle of it?

That is non-working time, and it is deliberate. The coloured segments are the hours your resource actually works; the gap is the evening, the night, the weekend or the mid-shift break. The grey base bar running behind them is the task’s real extent from start to finish. Nothing is missing — the gap is the information.

Why can’t I drag a bar to reschedule it?

Dragging is switched off in the Hourly View, and you get told so: Bars can’t be moved or linked in the Hourly View. Use the Task Form to change dates. Double-click the task and edit the dates there. The restriction belongs to the view, so switching the same chart to Daily View gives you dragging back — at day resolution.

My 20-minute task looks like it takes an hour. Why?

Because Hourly View – Shapes Based is off, and cell-fill drawing works in whole cells — it cannot paint a third of one, so it paints the full hour. The duration in the grid is still 20 minutes and every calculation uses that figure; only the picture is rounded. Tick Hourly View – Shapes Based in Settings if you would rather see the true width.

Do I still need to set a baseline on an hourly chart?

Yes, if you ever want to answer “are we late?”. The Baseline dates are recorded and compared exactly as they are on a daily chart — the Hourly View simply doesn’t draw a second bar for them. Set the baseline as usual on the Task Form, and switch to Daily View when you want to see it drawn.