How to Make a Gantt Chart

A Gantt chart lists a project's tasks down the left and draws each one as a bar along a date axis. Making one takes five steps, and the first four need nothing more than a piece of paper: work out the tasks, date them, decide what depends on what and mark the key dates. Only then do you pick a tool and draw it. This guide walks through each step, using a small website launch plan as the example.

Step 1: List the tasks

Write down everything that has to happen for the project to finish. Don't worry about dates or order yet.

Aim for tasks of about the same size. If one task would take three months and another an afternoon, split the big one or fold the small one into a neighbor. Five to ten tasks is plenty for a chart you intend to show someone. A longer plan reads better grouped by phase or team.

Our website launch has four tasks: Research, Design, Build and Testing. It also has a launch date, which we'll come back to in step 4.

Step 2: Give each task a start and end date

Estimate how long each task will take, then work out its dates. You can count forward from the day the project starts, or backward from a deadline that can't move.

Task	Start	End
Research	Mar 2, 2026	Mar 13, 2026
Design	Mar 16, 2026	Apr 3, 2026
Build	Apr 6, 2026	May 15, 2026
Testing	May 11, 2026	May 22, 2026

If you know a task's start date and how many days it takes, that works too, since the two give you the end date. The spreadsheet methods below start from exactly that.

Step 3: Work out what depends on what

Some tasks can't start until another one finishes. In our plan, Design waits for Research and Build waits for Design, so each starts on the Monday after the one before it ends. These links are called dependencies, and they matter because a delay to the first task pushes back every task that waits on it.

Other tasks can overlap. Testing starts during the last week of Build, because the finished parts of the site can be tested while the rest is being built.

Go through your list and ask of each task what has to be done before it can start. If the answer is nothing, it can run alongside other work, which is how a schedule gets shorter.

Step 4: Mark the milestones

A milestone is a single date that matters, such as a launch, an approval or a deadline, rather than a stretch of work. It gets a marker on the chart instead of a bar. Our plan has one: the launch on May 26, after Testing ends on May 22.

Milestones are usually the dates people outside the project ask about, so mark them even when the plan is small.

Step 5: Draw the chart

Put the tasks down the left in order of start date and the dates across the top. Then draw a bar for each task from its start date to its end date, and a marker for each milestone. Here is the website launch plan:

The chart shows things the table hides: the work runs in sequence until May, Build is the longest task by far, and Build and Testing overlap.

You could draw this by hand, but you will want to change it when the plan changes, and that is where the tool matters.

Choose a tool

Excel, Google Sheets, PowerPoint and Word have no Gantt chart type, so each needs a workaround. We have a guide for each one:

• Excel. Build a stacked bar chart, use conditional formatting or start from one of Microsoft's templates. See how to make a Gantt chart in Excel.
• Google Sheets. Build a stacked bar chart or use conditional formatting, and some Google Workspace plans have a timeline view that does a similar job. See how to make a Gantt chart in Google Sheets.
• PowerPoint. Build a stacked bar chart, draw the chart with a table and shapes or start from a template. See how to make a Gantt chart in PowerPoint.
• Word. Build a stacked bar chart or draw the chart with a table and shaded cells. See how to make a Gantt chart in Word.

These cost nothing extra if you already have the software, and they are fine for a short plan. The stacked bar chart all four share redraws when you change a date, but it can't show dependencies between tasks or how much of a task is complete.

Make it in Preceden

In Preceden you type the tasks and their dates, and it draws the chart. Create a new timeline with the Gantt Chart layout, then add your tasks with their start and end dates. You can type them in one at a time, use the Bulk Editor, which works like a spreadsheet, or import an Excel or CSV file as our CSV and Excel import guide describes. Importing is part of our paid plans. On the free plan you can create timelines with up to 10 events each, which is enough for the example on this page.

The planning from steps 3 and 4 carries straight over. You can make a task start when another one ends, so its dates move on their own when the earlier task changes, and you can mark any event as a milestone. You can also shade each bar by its percent complete. Our guide to creating Gantt charts covers each of these.

When the chart is ready, share a link to it or download it as an image or PDF, as our guide to printing and exporting your timeline describes. Preceden is built for communicating a schedule rather than running the work, so you can't assign tasks to people or calculate a critical path in it.

Keep the chart up to date

A Gantt chart is a plan, and plans change. When a task slips, move its bar and check every task that depends on it. Update the chart whenever the dates change, or people will keep planning around dates that are no longer true.

New to Gantt charts? See what is a Gantt chart for its parts and history. For more plans to start from, see our Gantt chart examples. Not sure whether your project needs a Gantt chart at all? See Gantt chart vs timeline for how to choose.