Charting: Creating a Gantt chart
If you are familiar with project management and the various tools that are used to schedule deadlines and resources, you may be familiar with Gantt charts.
In this particular tutorial, we look at using stacked bar charts
First, we need to tabulate our project data. The numbers in columns D & E are total days completed & estimated days remaining in each task respectively.
Selecting the above table, we invoke the chart wizard with Insert - Chart.
Both the first row and column are selected as labels..
Select the Bar Chart type - below…
Of the different bar chart types, we choose the stacked variant - below…
Here, we add a meaningful title..
The ‘finished’ chart. We have some postprocessing further to perform before it looks like a Gantt chart. Select it for editing…
The blue bar above represents the start date of each task. We will make it disappear. Fist double click on any blue bar to invoke the Data Series editor below. Set the area fill to None and remove the border.
This is what the chart looks like with the blue bars removed …
Now select the Y axis for editing as shown below…
We now want to adjust the Scale settings for the Y-axis based on the timelines defined in the initial table.
The major interval (61.0) is approximately 2 months. The minor interval (1.0) is one day.
On the Label tab, we rotate the text to almost 270 degrees as shown below…
The finished Gantt chart…
