Excel Gantt Chart Generator
Build a Gantt chart workbook with a shaded bar for every task across a dated timeline.
| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Project Plan | ||||||||
| 2 | |||||||||
| 3 | Task | Start (day) | Duration (days) | Finish | 1/9 | 2/9 | 3/9 | 4/9 | 5/9 |
| 4 | Discovery | 0 | 5 | =B4+C4 | |||||
| 5 | Design | 5 | 8 | =B5+C5 | |||||
| 6 | Build | 12 | 15 | =B6+C6 | |||||
| 7 | Test | 25 | 6 | =B7+C7 | |||||
| 8 | Launch | 31 | 2 | =B8+C8 | |||||
| 9 | |||||||||
| 10 | The bars are cell fills written at generation time. Editing a start or duration updates the Finish column, but the bar stays where it is - regenerate here, or drag the fill across in Excel. | ||||||||
| 11 | |||||||||
| 12 | |||||||||
| 13 | Timeline starts 2026-09-01 | ||||||||
| 14 | |||||||||
| 15 | |||||||||
| 16 | |||||||||
| 17 |
Preview of the first 22 rows. Cells shown as =SUM(...) are live formulas in the downloaded workbook, not pasted numbers.
What you get
- •One row per task with its start, duration and finish, and a shaded bar across the timeline.
- •A dated header so the timeline reads as real dates rather than day numbers.
- •Optional weekend shading, and a bordered grid so the bars read as a chart.
- •Finish is a formula, so changing a start or duration moves the finish date with it.
- •The bars are cell fills written when you generate, not a live rule - edit the plan here and regenerate.
About this template
A Gantt chart is a plan drawn against time: one row per task, a bar showing when it runs, and a shared timeline across the top so overlaps and gaps are obvious. This builds one as a spreadsheet grid - the bars are coloured cells, not a chart object floating over the sheet.
It is for small plans that do not justify project software: a launch, a build, a house move, a course, a piece of client work with four or five phases. You describe the tasks on this page as name, start day and duration, and get back a workbook you can print, paste into a document, or hand to someone who only has a spreadsheet.
The sheet puts the project name in the banner, and row 3 heads four label columns - Task, Start, Duration, Finish - followed by one column per day or week of the timeline. Each timeline column is headed with a real date, in day/month form, counted from the project start date; in week mode the headings read W1, W2 and so on. Task rows follow from row 4, every timeline cell carries a thin grid border, and weekends are shaded a pale grey in day mode so a bar crossing a weekend is visible for what it is.
Two things are worth knowing before you rely on it. Start is an offset in units from the project start, not a date - day 0 is the start date itself. And the bars are fills written at generation time, not a conditional-formatting rule: editing a start or duration in Excel updates the Finish column but leaves the bar where it was. The timeline is also capped at 120 columns, so a mistyped duration cannot produce a sheet thousands of columns wide.
How to use it
- Write the plan on this page first - One task per line as name, start day, duration - for example Design | 5 | 8, meaning it begins on day 5 and runs for 8 days. Commas work as well as pipes, and a comma inside a task name is kept, because the two numbers are read from the end of the line rather than by position.
- Choose the unit and the start date - Days give you a column per day headed with its date; weeks give a column per week headed W1, W2 and so on, which is the readable choice for a plan running past a couple of months. The project start date is day 0 and every column heading counts from it.
- Read the plan in the workbook - Each row shows its start and duration as numbers you can edit, a Finish column that adds them, and a bar spanning exactly those columns. The header row and the four label columns are frozen, so task names stay visible while you scroll along a long timeline.
- Change a date and repaint the bar - Editing Start or Duration updates Finish immediately, but the bar does not move - it is a fill. Either come back here and regenerate, which takes seconds, or copy a filled cell and paste it across the new span, then clear the fill from the cells the task has left.
- Add a task in Excel - Insert a row inside the task block, type the name, start and duration, and copy the Finish cell down from the row above so the new row carries the formula. Then paint its bar across the timeline columns.
- Print it as one page - Page Layout > Orientation > Landscape, then Fit All Columns on One Page. A day-by-day plan longer than about six weeks is usually easier to read regenerated in weeks than shrunk to fit.
Formulas in this workbook
Every formula below is written into the workbook itself, exactly as shown. The cell references are the ones the default options produce; change the row or column counts and they shift to match.
=B4+C4- The Finish column on every task row: start offset plus duration, in timeline units. A task starting on day 5 and running 8 days finishes at 13, which is the first unit it is no longer running in - the bar covers days 5 to 12. It is an offset rather than a date, so it stays meaningful whether the timeline is in days or weeks, and it is the one live formula in the workbook.
Customising it
- Recolour a task by selecting its bar cells and using Home > Fill Colour - the bars are ordinary fills, so a bar per owner or per workstream is just a different colour.
- Mark a milestone by giving a task a duration of 1: it renders as a single filled cell, which reads as a point rather than a span.
- Mark today by selecting the timeline column whose date heading matches and giving it a border or a light fill, then moving it as the plan progresses.
- Add an owner or status column by inserting a column before the timeline; the bars shift with it and stay aligned to their headings, because they are cells rather than a floating chart.
- Convert offsets to real dates by putting the project start in a spare cell below the grid and adding a column with =$A$16+B4 formatted as a date, so the plan shows both the offset it is built on and the date a task actually begins.
Frequently Asked Questions
They are filled cells. Each timeline column is one unit of the plan, and the cells a task spans are given a background colour, with a thin border on every cell so the grid reads as a chart. There is no chart object and none of the usual stacked-bar-with-an-invisible-series trickery, which is why the file opens the same way in Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice and prints exactly as it looks.
No, and the sheet says so in a note below the grid. Finish recalculates because it is a formula, but a fill is not a formula and nothing repaints it. For anything more than a small tweak, changing the task line here and regenerating is faster than repainting by hand.
It is an offset in timeline units from the project start: 0 is the start date, 5 is five days later in day mode or five weeks later in week mode. The real dates live in the timeline headings across the top, which is what keeps a task's position independent of the calendar you generated it against.
It spans the whole plan plus two units of breathing room, and is capped at 120 columns. The cap is there so a duration typed with an extra zero produces a wide sheet rather than an unusable one; if your plan genuinely runs longer, switch the unit to weeks.
It is switched off, because a column that covers seven days is neither a weekend nor a weekday. In day mode the shading is worked out from the real calendar dates, so it stays correct however far along the timeline you look.