Next, right-click on any blank area in the newly created chart and choose Select Data. From the Insert tab on the Excel Ribbon, choose to insert a 2-D Stacked Bar Chart. First, select the Task and Start Date columns. If you’re having trouble getting your initial stacked bar chart to look like the one above, you may need to approach the construction in a slightly different way. Alternative Directions for Creating the Initial Stacked Bar Chart This isn’t at all what we want as a final version, but we now have a representation that contains our basic information that we can modify to reach our desired appearance.
You’ll end up with an image like that in the following screenshot. Next, navigate to the Insert screen of Excel and choose the option to insert a stacked bar chart. First, as shown in the image below, hold down the CTRL key and select the columns that contain the Task, Start Date, Days Completed, and Days Remaining Data. We will use the stacked bar chart option in Excel to create our Gantt chart.
As with any of the other images in this tutorial, you can click on it to see a larger view. Additionally, the screenshot below shows the table created for this example. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’ve created a sample file entitled Sample Gantt Chart Created in Excel with project data that can be downloaded from the Project Management Media Gallery. The first thing you want to do in preparation for creating a Gantt chart in Excel is to input the project timeline data into a spreadsheet.