Documentation / Tasks / Priority, status & task colours

Priority, status & task colours

Priority is yours to set; status is worked out for you from % Complete. Between them they colour every task row, and they are what the ribbon’s status filters act on.

Two small columns sit next to the task name — Priority and Status — and they look like a matching pair. They aren’t. Priority is a label you choose and Gantt Excel never changes. Status is calculated, every time the sheet refreshes, from the task’s % Complete. Knowing which is which saves a lot of puzzlement about why one of them keeps snapping back.

01 What each one is for

PRIORITY

“How much does this one matter?”

Three values — High, Normal or Low — and you pick them yourself. Nothing in the scheduling engine reads Priority: it does not reorder tasks, does not decide who gets a resource first, and has no effect whatsoever on dates, dependencies or the critical path.

What it does do is colour the Priority cell, so a High task is visible from across the room when you scroll a hundred-row plan. It is also reported on: the Dashboard counts and charts your tasks by priority and offers it as a slicer, and the Web Report carries each task’s priority with it.

STATUS

“Where has this one got to?”

Three values again — Not Started, In Progress and Completed — but you don’t choose them. Each one is derived from the task’s % Complete and rewritten automatically, so the two can never disagree.

Status is what the ribbon’s three status filters hide and show. The colour strip at the left of the row and the tick in the Done column look as though they follow it, but they don’t — like the Status cell itself, both are worked out from % Complete directly. All three read the same number, which is why they can never contradict one another.

02 Setting a task’s priority

Every new task starts at Normal. There are three ways to change it, and they all write the same thing:

Double-click the Priority cell. A small picker opens with three coloured buttons — High, Normal, Low — each painted in that priority’s own colour. Click one and the picker closes. This is the quickest route and the one worth learning.

Use the Task Form. Double-click anywhere else on the row and pick from the Priority dropdown. The dropdown’s background tints to match your choice as you make it. See The Task Form.

Type straight into the cell. Type high, normal or low in any capitalisation — Gantt Excel tidies it to the proper form. Anything it doesn’t recognise is refused with Task priority can be set as High, Normal or Low. and the cell falls back to Normal.

Leave the cell empty and the task simply has no priority — the cell keeps the plain row background instead of a colour fill. That is a legitimate state for tasks where the label would be noise — but it is not one you can create. Emptying the cell puts Normal straight back, whether you type over it or press Delete: a blank arriving in that column is read as “no answer given” and answered with the default. An empty priority is what you get on a chart where it was never filled in, not something you can clear a cell down to.

Double-click a Priority cell to open the picker. The form itself is tinted to the task’s current priority.

03 Status is calculated, not chosen

A task’s status comes from one number: % Complete. The rule has no other inputs — not dates, not dependencies, not whether the end date has passed.

% Complete	Status	Done column
0%	Not Started	unticked
1% – 99%	In Progress	unticked
100%	Completed	ticked

So you never set a status directly — you move the percentage and the status follows. Type 35 into % Complete and the task becomes In Progress in the same keystroke; mark the task Done and it jumps to 100% and Completed together. Everything about how that percentage is arrived at — typed by hand, calculated from elapsed time, rolled up from child tasks — is in the % Complete guide.

ℹ️Marking a task Done is a click or a double-click, never something you type. Where your version of Excel offers a real in-cell tickbox, the Done cell is one and you click it. Where it doesn’t, the column shows a tick you cannot click — double-click the cell instead. Typing into it is refused either way with Double-click this cell to mark the task as complete., and the cell is put back to whatever the percentage says. If % Complete is set to calculate automatically, the toggle is refused outright: Percentage Complete calculation is set to Automatic. You can turn this off in the Settings window.

On the Task Form the Status box is effectively read-only. Click into it and a message appears in the form: Task Status is automatically set based on Task Percentage Completed. Focus moves straight back out, and the box updates itself the moment you change the % Complete field beside it.

Worked example — the kitchen refit

“Fit kitchen units” is planned for Mon 6 July → Fri 10 July, a 5-day task on a Monday–Friday week. It sits at 0%, so it reads Not Started. On the Tuesday you record 40% done and it becomes In Progress without you touching the Status column. On the Friday you mark it Done: 100%, Completed, and the row drops out of view if Show Completed is switched off.

That sequence assumes % Complete is being entered by hand, which is how a new chart starts. With automatic calculation switched on in Settings, neither the typed 40% nor the Done toggle would be accepted — the percentage is derived for you, and the status and the tick follow it without your help. Which mode you are in, and what automatic actually calculates from, is in the % Complete guide.

04 The colours on a task row

Four separate things on a row are coloured from priority and progress, and they answer different questions. It is worth knowing which is which, because they deliberately disagree with each other at times.

Task rows showing the colour strip, task icon, WBS, task name, a tinted Priority cell, the Status cell and the Done tickbox, with one row in progress, one completed and ticked, and one not started. — Hover or tap a numbered pin to see which colour comes from where.

On the sheet, Overdue is a colour rather than a status

With Show Overdue Bars switched on in Settings, a task whose Estimated end date has passed while it is still under 100% is painted in the Overdue colour — on its bar, and on the status strip at the left of the row. On the task sheet that is all it is: the Status cell still reads In Progress or Not Started, and the three status filters still treat it as such. A task at 100% is never overdue, however late it finished.

The Dashboard and the Web Report are the exception, and it is worth knowing before you compare two numbers that ought to agree. Both classify each task four ways rather than three, with Overdue as a value in its own right, and they check it before In Progress — so a task that is 40% done with its Estimated end date in the past is counted as Overdue there while its Status cell on the sheet still reads In Progress. The two are not contradicting each other; they are answering different questions.

05 Changing the colours

All of these colours are per-project and live in one place — Gantt Excel → Settings → Settings. Six swatches cover priority and status:

Swatch in Settings	Colours
High Priority	The Priority cell of every High task
Normal Priority	The Priority cell of every Normal task
Low Priority	The Priority cell of every Low task
Completed Tasks	The status strip at 100%, and the Done tick
In Progress Tasks	The status strip between 1% and 99%
Not Started Tasks	The status strip at 0%

⚠️Set the project’s Theme to Custom first — none of these swatches will open otherwise. The Theme dropdown in the same window offers Blue, Classic, Excel, Dark and Custom, and the four named palettes are read-only. Click any of the six swatches above — or the Overdue swatch — while one of them is selected and no colour picker appears at all: you simply get Set the theme to CUSTOM to change this color. and the colour stays as it was. Switching the theme is a prerequisite for this whole section, not an alternative to it — Colours & themes covers how the five palettes work and why only one of them is yours to edit.

With the theme set to Custom, click a swatch, pick a colour, and the whole sheet repaints straight away — there is no Apply step and nothing to refresh. The Overdue swatch is in the same window, alongside the Show Overdue Bars tickbox that switches the effect on.

Your chosen colour is used exactly as you picked it: Gantt Excel never lightens, darkens or tints it. That is why the label sitting on a Priority cell is a fixed neutral grey rather than a shade derived from your colour — a grey reads cleanly on any hue you choose, and an earlier derived-colour scheme produced light orange on dark orange.

Six swatches in Settings drive every priority and status colour on the sheet — editable while the Theme is Custom.

The full tour of that window, including which settings are per-project and which are shared, is in the Settings guide.

06 Filtering the chart by status

The ribbon carries three tickboxes under Gantt Excel → Filters — Show Completed, Show In Progress and Show Not Started. Untick one and every task in that state is hidden from the sheet.

They read the same % Complete thresholds the Status column does, so what you see and what the Status cell says can never drift apart. A summary task stays visible as long as at least one of its children matches what is still ticked — otherwise a phase would vanish and take visible work with it.

Three behaviours are worth knowing before you reach for them:

One must always stay ticked. Untick the last one and Gantt Excel refuses with At least one option must be selected. — an empty sheet is never a useful view.
While any of the three is off, the task-editing buttons grey out. It is a longer list than most people expect: Add Task, Add Milestone, Duplicate, Delete, Make Parent, Make Child, Move Up, Move Down, Row Height, Project Dashboard, Enable Grouping, Expand Groups and Collapse Groups all switch off, and the Gantt Excel entries on the right-click menu are replaced by a greyed note. The reason is the same for all of them: inserting or moving a row while other rows are hidden puts the task somewhere you can’t see. Gantt Excel explains as much the moment you untick a filter, and hovering a greyed button repeats it — Not available while the task list is filtered. Turn Show Completed, Show In Progress and Show Not Started back on to use this. Try to type a new task straight into the sheet and you’ll get Some tasks are hidden. Enable Show Completed, Show In Progress and Show Not Started on the Gantt Excel tab to continue.
The dependency arrows and the new-task row disappear too. With any filter off, Gantt Excel strips every dependency connector from the chart and clears the empty add a task row at the foot of the list. Neither is a fault and neither needs repairing: a connector is drawn between two visible bars, so with rows hidden it would point at nothing, and a task typed into that bottom row is precisely the one you would not be able to see afterwards. Tick all three filters back on and the connectors are redrawn and the row comes back.

07 Common questions

I set a task to Completed and it went straight back to In Progress. Why?

Because status is calculated from % Complete, and that task isn’t at 100%. Whatever you type into the Status cell is recalculated as part of the same edit. Set the percentage to 100 — or tick Done, which does it in one click — and the status will read Completed and stay there.

Does setting a task to High priority make it happen sooner?

No. Priority is a label and nothing in the scheduling engine reads it. Dates come from your Estimated dates, durations, resource calendars and dependencies — see Linking tasks with dependencies. If a task needs to happen earlier, move its dates or change what it waits on.

One of my Priority cells has no colour at all.

Its Priority cell is empty, so there is no priority to colour — the cell keeps the plain row background. That’s a valid state, not a fault. Double-click the cell and pick High, Normal or Low if you want it filled.

A task is late but its status still says In Progress. Shouldn’t it say Overdue?

On the task sheet, Overdue is a colour rather than a status. With Show Overdue Bars on in Settings, a task past its Estimated end date and under 100% is painted in the Overdue colour on its bar and status strip — but the Status column keeps reporting where the work has got to, and the status filters keep treating it as In Progress or Not Started. The Dashboard and the Web Report do report Overdue as a status of its own, which is why a task can be counted Overdue there and read In Progress here.

Why are Add Task and Delete greyed out?

Almost always because one of the three status filters is unticked, so some rows are hidden. Tick Show Completed, Show In Progress and Show Not Started all back on and the task buttons come straight back. An Excel AutoFilter left on the sheet does the same thing. (Grouping is different — it greys out the three status filters, not the task buttons.)

I switched the chart to another language — will my priorities survive?

Yes. Priority and status are stored on each row as language-independent values, and the words in the Priority and Status columns are only a rendering of them in whichever language the project is set to. Switch language and every task keeps the priority you gave it. See Working in another language.