Free Gantt Chart Excel Template
What is actually inside the workbook
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.
You have decided on Excel. So here is what actually arrives when you download this one — not a picture of a Gantt chart, but a workbook with the scheduling engine already built into it.
It is an ordinary Excel file. It opens in Excel, it saves where your files live, and it works with no internet connection and no account. What makes it different from a fill-in-the-blanks grid is that it does the arithmetic: dates, durations, rollups, dependencies and the critical path are all worked out for you, and reworked every time you change something.
01 What you see when you open it
Two things appear that were not there before. A Gantt Excel tab arrives on the ribbon, to the left of Home, holding every control the template has. And your workbook gains a chart sheet split down the middle: a task grid on the left that you type into, and a timeline on the right where the bars are drawn.
You never draw a bar. You fill in a row, and the bar appears in the right place, at the right length, in the right colour.
02 The columns you type into
The task grid is where the plan lives. Most of it you fill in; some of it fills itself.
The plan
Task name, start date, duration, priority, notes, and who is assigned. Indent a row and the one above it becomes a phase heading.
The consequences
Finish dates, phase rollups, WBS numbering, the critical path, resource cost, and whether a task is on track or overdue.
What is on screen
Which columns show, row heights, column widths, colours and theme. Hide what you do not use — nothing breaks when a column is off.
There is also a task form, if you would rather fill in a dialog than type across a wide grid. It holds everything about one task in one place — dates, dependencies, progress, resources, costs and bar colours. The Task Form →
03 Seven ways to look at the same plan
The timeline is a window onto a stretch of dates, and you decide how wide one column is. Hourly and Daily sit on the ribbon; Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, Half Yearly and Yearly are one click further along.
Changing view does not change your plan. The same tasks and dates are simply drawn at a different zoom — useful when a builder needs this fortnight in days and a board needs the whole year on one page.
04 The parts that do the work
Dependencies
Link two tasks and the schedule reorders itself. All four link types are there — finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish, start-to-finish — with lag and lead time when a task has to wait, or can start early. How dependencies work →
The critical path
The chain of tasks that decides your finish date, identified automatically and re-identified every time the schedule moves. The critical path and float →
Working calendars
Dates are counted in real working days and hours, per resource. Someone who does not work Fridays gets dates that respect that, without you doing the arithmetic. Resources, calendars and working days →
Progress against the promise
Save a baseline and record actual dates alongside it. The two together answer the question you will be asked in every status meeting. Baselines and actuals → · Understanding % Complete →
05 Getting the plan out of Excel
Not everyone who needs to see the plan has Excel, and fewer still want to be sent a spreadsheet.
The dashboard. One sheet answering how the project is doing — spend against budget, what is finished, what is overdue, and how the work splits by status, priority and person. Read more →
The web report. A single HTML file you email to a client or a board. They open it in a browser, with nothing installed, and it still opens years later. Read more →
PDF and plain XLSX. A snapshot for printing, or the data on its own for anyone who wants it without the machinery. Read more →
06 One choice to make before you start
A chart is either daily or hourly, and you pick which as you create it.
07 Common questions
What file type is it?
Will it change my other spreadsheets?
What do I need to run it?
Can I move a plan I already have into it?
Can more than one person work on it at once?
Does it work in other languages?
Download our Free Gantt Chart Template
Opens in Microsoft Excel on Windows and Mac. No sign-up, nothing to install.
8,960,000+
Amazing People Use Gantt Excel