Gantt Chart Template

A Gantt chart is a very popular planning tool that is often used to manage projects and to provide to the management/project board a status update. Learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of the Gantt Chart and download a sample chart in Word directly.

How do I create a Gantt chart in Word?

 Often, such a planner chart tool consists of just 4 basic components, like: 

• Task names (description of the task or activity);
• Taskbars (the start date and lead time for the task or activity);
• Milestones, (A milestone marks the end of a piece of work or phase of the project. They are often fixed dates with or important dates that you need to be aware);
• Dependencies, how tasks group together, overlap, and link with each other? (Tasks that can only start and finish, or are directly impacted, if another task is finished before them. Therefore it’s common to add a number in the column  This is often an easier way of quickly finding out which task links where. Use the numbers in this column to track back the task dependencies – it can be faster than trying to trace a spidery line on the Gantt chart.).

The great advantage of a Gantt chart is that they take complex project information and organize it in a visual way that is easy to understand. This can help to increase the project teams’ productivity and to accomplish the milestones within the time required with the resources available. For example, it’s very easy and quick to see the following important characteristics that can be deducted from a Gantt Chart:

• Project start date (planned start date that you aim to start working on the task);
• Project finish date (the date the project is delivered successfully):
  
• Assigned / Owner; Who is working on a task? This column tells you the name of the person or role/resource (supplier) who has been allocated to work on the task. At the start of the project you may only have resource type but as you go through you should be able to replace this with the names of actual team members;
• When will tasks be implemented (start and finish, or planned duration: a single number that reflects how many days there are between the planned start date and the planned finish date. It is based on working days, so if a task is planned to take a week it will reflect the amount of (working) days);
• Which tasks are executed? ; percent complete: A figure, mostly always based on an educated guess by the person doing the task, of how much work they have done and how much is still to do;
• How long each task will take? An important suggestion for project managers is that you always need to be aware of activities that stay at 85-90% complete status for too long. Usually, this is a sign that the task owner does not exactly know how much work there is still to do. Each time an update is provided, the percent complete should move up, unless no work has actually taken place. Monitoring this ‘percent complete’ indicator is a good way to get an early warning about tasks that might run late;
• Planned effort: How many hours of work the task will take within the duration. Think about painting a wall. It might only take you an hour to paint the first coat but then you’ve got to leave it two hours to dry before the next coat. Then you paint again and leave it to dry again. That’s only two hours of the actual painting (effort) but six hours in total (duration);

Just download this ready-made Gantt Chart template in Google Docs, MS Word or Apple Pages format and you’re good to go. Open it, modify it, or print it directly. An alternative Gantt Chart Excel Template can be found here.