So you need to make a Gantt chart that's fast and easy
and you have zero experience?
Well, you've come to the right place
because in this video, I'm going to share with you
how you can make a Gantt chart
in Excel with no experience needed or necessary.
And at the end of this video,
I'm going to share with you
how you can get your hands on my six basic tips
that are going to ensure your projects are successful.
So stay tuned for that.
Hi, if you're new here, welcome.
My name is Adriana Girdler
and you have landed on the
Practical Project Management Channel,
the Practical Project Management channel.
I feel that's going to give you the best advice
for your projects in a very practical way.
Now, that all being said, you want to learn about Gantts
and how do you make a Gantt chart in Excel super easy?
Let's get to it.
So you want to make a Gantt chart from an Excel action plan.
Super easy to do.
You have to make sure that you have a few things,
your start, end date, duration, and your progress.
So, once you have this, this is going to be very simple.
If you want to know how to make one,
you can just go to the search bar on YouTube.
Go "Adriana Girdler Excel Action Plan".
And I actually have a video on how to make this.
But let's assume that you already have one
and how do you do this?
So the first thing you want to do
is you wany to highlight all of your start dates.
And when you highlight that, you want to go to your menu bar,
bar, go to insert, go over here to your bars
and you want to go your 2D bar chart, the stacked one.
Now you have a chart.
So let's bring that over
and you are now ready to start working on your Gantt.
Make that a little bit longer
so you can work with some of the dates here.
All right. Once you have this,
your next step is we want to add the duration.
And the best way to do the duration
is I'm going to right click on my chart,
I'm going to go to select data,
and with a select data, I'm going to go add.
And I have a series name here and it's for duration.
So I have my duration
and now I want to put this series value.
So I'm going to take out what I currently have here
and I'm going to highlight my duration that I have on my
chart. I'm going to press OK.
And you notice I have all these orange bars
which is fantastic.
That's exactly what we want.
Now, what we do now need is we have these numbers
over on our y axis.
So, I now need to ensure that we fix that.
So, I'm going to go over here to edit
and I'm going to get this range,
which is really the action items
and I'm going to put this here.
And now you can see.
What we have,
I'm going to press OK,
is we now have a bar chart.
But that's not what we're looking for,
we're looking for a Gantt chart
and the Gantt chart is based on the duration.
So, what do we do next?
Well, we now want to remove
this here, these bars so we can just have the duration.
So let me click on those bars.
So I just clicked on them with my mouse
and now I'm going to right click
and I'm going to go over here and do no fill
and I'm going to have no outline.
So now, I removed it.
But what I'm also noticing too, and you are as well
is you're probably noticing that my first value
is create and prepare, but it's here on my last.
So now I have to go in
and I have to reverse this information.
So let's format the access.
Access.
And I'm going to go over here
and click on categories in reverse order.
So now we're actually getting somewhere
So the next step for us to do is how to remove this space
to the left and to the right of our bar chart.
So, the easiest thing to do is you want to find out in
essence the actual number for your dates
because that's how Excel works.
So, I'm going to do a couple things here.
I'm going to add a couple of dates.
I'm going to add the start date of September 1st
and it's 2022.
And then I'm going to also add another date here
called December.
Oops.
December 2nd, 2022.
Great.
So, if I want to know the numbers of those, it's very
simple. I just put my mouse on that cell.
I go up here to my menu
and you see this little bar called numbers, it says custom,
create that dropdown and put general.
That general is actually going to give you
the number for that particular date.
And the same thing for your end date.
Now, now that you have that,
we want to ensure that we actually don't have all these
dates. So I'm going to put my mouse over the dates
and you see this min and max,
these are the dates we want to the numbers
which are actual dates we're going to transfer over here.
So my min is 44805
and my max is going to be 44897.
So now you see, wow,
like, this is already looking really good,
telling me how it's looking.
I'm going to make this a little bit longer.
And so, now you can start to see
the actual bar chart coming to life.
You could stop here.
This would be absolutely fine.
Nothing wrong with it.
But if you want to go a little bit further,
then we can actually take a look
at maybe changing some colors,
doing a little more formatting.
I'm just going to delete these
because there's no need for me to have them.
Delete and delete.
And, now let's see what else we can do
to make this a little more interesting.
So, I've just did a click on the chart.
I'm going to go here under plus
and I'm going to go to Gridline with that little arrow
and I'm going to add some more.
I'm going to add a primary major horizontal
because I like to see where that's,
you know, is across.
I think I'm going add a minor vertical as well.
because I just want to have a little more understanding
in between my dates.
I'm liking that.
That's making me feel really good.
I really appreciate that.
I'm going to take away the chart title
because that's something that I don't need
and don't really care for.
And at this point, you could be good.
So one of the last things you can do if you'd like,
you don't necessarily have to,
is you can make these bars slightly wider if you'd like.
So, the way you do that is we click over here
and we go to gap width.
And I'm just going to make that 50%.
And you can see now we have wider bars.
I'm just going to click out of the area.
And you now have yourself a Gantt chart
based on the information here which is pretty cool.
Very simple, super fast.
Okay. You now know how to do a Gantt chart.
Congrats.
Now you need this.
It's free underneath this video.
Six basics that you must have
for all your projects to be successful.
I highly recommend you get it.
It's my gift to you, free.
Do it.
It's a no brainer.
Thanks.
See you at the next video.