The Gantt Excel tab & your chart sheet

A Gantt Excel chart is an ordinary Excel worksheet with a great deal of machinery behind it. The left-hand side is a task grid you type into; the right-hand side is the timeline where the bars are drawn. Driving all of it is a single ribbon tab called Gantt Excel, which appears to the left of Home as soon as the workbook opens.

01 The Gantt Excel tab

The tab sits before the Home tab, so it is the first thing on the ribbon. Press Alt then G to jump straight to it from the keyboard — that and every other shortcut in the product is listed in Keyboard shortcuts.

Throughout these guides a ribbon path is written as Gantt Excel → Section → Button. So the way to add a task is Gantt Excel → Tasks → Add Task.

02 What is on the ribbon

Ten sections, left to right. Here is the whole tab at once, on an hourly chart:

That is a lot to read at ribbon size, so the same tab is broken into three below. Hover or tap a numbered pin to see what each part is for; the key under each strip says the same thing in full.

1The chart itself. Create a new chart, or edit the project name, lead and budget. 2Reports. The dashboard and the web report, both read-only views of the plan. 3Adding and editing. Add a task or milestone, open the Task Form, duplicate or delete. 4Structure and order. Indent, outdent and move a task up or down the list.

1. The chart itself. Add New Gantt Chart builds a fresh chart sheet; Edit Project opens the project name, lead and budget figures that sit above the grid.
2. Reports. Dashboard is a small menu holding Project Dashboard and Web Report (HTML)… — see The Project Dashboard and The Web Report.
3. Adding and editing. Add Task, Add Milestone, Edit, Duplicate and Delete. See Adding, editing & deleting tasks.
4. Structure and order. Make Parent and Make Child set the outline level; Move Up and Move Down reorder rows. See Summary tasks, indenting & the WBS.

1The time scale. How wide one timeline column is, from an hour up to a year. 2The timeline window. Which stretch of dates the chart draws. 3Jumping about. Scroll the timeline to the start, to today, or to the end.

1. The time scale. Hourly View and Daily View sit on the tab; More Views holds Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Half Yearly and Yearly. Hourly View only appears on an hourly chart.
2. The timeline window. Setup Timeline sets the first and last date drawn; Show Full Timeline widens it to cover every task.
3. Jumping about. Scroll To holds Scroll to Start, Scroll to Today and Scroll to End — they move the view, never the dates.

1Grouping. Turns parent tasks into collapsible Excel outline groups. 2Rows and Columns. Row height and column width for the task grid. 3Resources. The people on the project, and the calendar each one works. 4Settings. Every project option, including which columns are on screen. 5Export. The chart as a PDF, or the data as a plain XLSX. 6About. Your version number and licence details.

1. Grouping. Expand Groups and Collapse Groups open and close every summary task at once. See Grouping & task filters.
2. Rows and Columns. Row Height for all task rows at once, Column Width for the selected column, and Auto Col Width to fit a column to its contents.
3. Resources. The project’s people, their rates and their working calendars. See Resources, calendars & working days.
4. Settings. Every project option in one window — dates, costs, colours, the critical path, and the columns list. See Settings.
5. Export. Export to PDF and Export to XLSX. See Exporting & printing.
6. About. The version number to quote if you ever write to support.

Three sets of controls are tick boxes rather than icon buttons, so they are not in the strips above: the Filters section, Enable Grouping, and Show Timeline and Refresh Timeline in the timeline group. They are all in the table below.

Every button, section by section

Two things are commonly hunted for on this tab and are not there:

• Show Critical Path is a tick box inside Settings, not a ribbon button. See The Critical Path & float.
• Hourly View only appears on an hourly chart. On a day-based chart the button is hidden entirely, because there are no hours to show — see Planning by the hour.

03 When buttons go grey

Gantt Excel deliberately greys out buttons rather than letting them run and fail. There are four reasons a control can be disabled, and knowing which one is in play saves a lot of time:

Hover a greyed-out button and, for most of them, the tooltip tells you which of these is responsible rather than sitting there mute.

04 Your chart sheet, row by row

The worksheet is not a free-form spreadsheet. It has a fixed shape, and the top of it is doing work. The same row numbers mean different things on the two halves of the sheet, which is worth knowing before you go looking for something:

The header text in row 9 is translated with the rest of the product, so on a French project the Duration column is headed Durée.

05 The columns you get

A brand-new chart shows nine columns to the left of the timeline. That is deliberately a small set — enough to build a plan, not so many that the timeline is squeezed off screen.

Fill in any two of Start, Finish and Duration and the third is calculated — so typing Mon 6 July and 5 against “Fit kitchen units” lands the finish on Fri 10 July, skipping the weekend. The Task Form explains that interlock in full.

The columns waiting in the wings

Another twenty-four named columns exist on every chart but start out hidden, and behind those sit twenty more that are entirely yours. Switch on the ones a project needs and leave the rest alone:

• Status — Not Started, In Progress or Completed. It is worked out from % Complete rather than typed: 0% is Not Started, 100% is Completed, anything in between is In Progress. The three ribbon filters read % Complete directly too, so hiding this column does not affect them and showing it does not switch them on.
• Baseline Start, Baseline End, Baseline Duration and Actual Start, Actual End, Actual Duration — the two extra date bands. See Baselines & actuals.
• Baseline Cost, Est. Cost, Actual Cost, Resource Cost and Work — the money and work columns, covered in Work, costs & budget.
• WBS Predecessors and WBS Successors — what this task waits on, and what waits on it. See Linking tasks with dependencies.
• Late Start, Late Finish, Total Float, Free Slack and Critical — five read-only columns filled in by the scheduler. See The Critical Path & float.
• Notes — free text against the task.
• Bar Color, % Color, Baseline Color and Actual Color — per-task bar colours, also settable from the Task Form.
• Custom 1 to Custom 20 — twenty empty columns that are entirely yours. Rename the header to whatever you need — Supplier, PO number, Room — and the name sticks. They are the intended way to add your own data to a chart.

06 Showing, hiding and reordering columns

Column visibility is not an Excel job here — do it in Gantt Excel → Settings → Settings, on the columns list.

WBS and Task are not in the list. They are the backbone of the outline and are always shown, which is why they cannot be hidden or moved.

Column widths are separate. Gantt Excel → Rows and Columns gives you Row Height for all task rows at once, Column Width for the selected column, and Auto Col Width to size a column to its contents.

07 The right-click menu

Right-click any cell on a Gantt chart and the usual Excel menu gains ten Gantt Excel commands at the top, above a dividing line:

Show Task in Timeline is the one worth remembering on a long project — it saves scrolling sideways through a year of columns to find one bar.

Excel’s own Insert, Delete, Clear Contents, Filter and Sort entries are greyed out on a Gantt sheet, and so are Insert and Delete on the row-number and column-letter menus. The reason is the same one behind the block on manual row inserts: a row added by Excel is not a task, it is just a row.

On Mac, that greying does not happen either — it is part of the same context-menu customisation that Excel for Mac does not support. So a Mac sheet has neither the Gantt commands nor the guard rails: Excel’s own Insert and Delete stay live on the right-click menu. They are still caught afterwards, by the check that spots a hand-inserted row and undoes it, but you will meet that as a message rather than as a greyed-out entry.

With a task filter switched on, the ten items are replaced by a single greyed-out line reading Gantt options unavailable – the task list is filtered. That is deliberate: a block of commands that silently vanished would read as a fault, whereas one greyed line says why it has gone. Tick all three filters back on in Gantt Excel → Filters and the menu returns.

08 Common questions

Related: Creating your first chart · Adding, editing & deleting tasks · Settings · Views, timeline & zoom