Create and work with a Gantt chart

When you switch your sheet or report to Gantt View, tasks appear as bars in a timeline. You see the duration, the start date, and the finish date of your project tasks as project sheet columns.

Apart from that, you can also track the following:

• View Dependencies and track the relationship between tasks.
• View your project's Critical Path.
• Display the % Complete of your tasks.
• Use Hierarchy to create summary rows for further organization of your projects.

Before you add a Gantt chart

Your sheet or report must have at least two Date columns, representing the start date and the end date of your tasks. 

The length of a task bar represents the span of time between those dates. This is why you need at least two Date columns; otherwise, you can’t switch to Gantt View.

The Gantt View doesn’t recognize Date columns with a Column Formula applied. If you need your dates to autofill rows, use the Cell Formula and Autofill features instead. You could also set up column formulas and use a report to display your Gantt chart.

Add a Gantt chart

• In the toolbar, select Gantt View to switch your view.

The chart appears to the right of your columns. There is also a divider that separates the grid columns from the Gantt chart. 

You can widen the display of either section by hovering over the divider and dragging the divider to the right or left.

Edit your Gantt chart

1. Right-click any column header in the Gantt chart and select Project Settings.
2. Modify the Project Settings in each tab according to your project needs:
   • Dependency Settings
   • Timeline Display
   • Resource Management

The sheet's Owner and Admins can modify the sheet Project Settings.

Adjust the Gantt chart timeline

The Gantt chart has four timeline zoom levels: quarter, month, week, and day.

Use the Zoom In or Zoom Out icons to adjust the view to what you need. 

You can save changes to the Gantt chart timeline, and these changes appear when exported. Only Viewers don’t have access to this option.

If you’re a sheet Owner or Admin access, you can configure and customize the Gantt chart's Primary and Secondary headers by modifying the Timeline Display directly in the sheet's Project Settings.

Work with Gantts 

Here are some tips when working with Gantts:

• Use baselines to compare a project’s scheduled times against actual completion. 
• Select and drag the center of a taskbar to move the task to new start and end dates.
• Use row hierarchies in Gantt charts to organize rows into sections or phases. Using hierarchies, child rows display as individual task bars in the Gantt chart based on their start and end dates. 

• If you use hierarchies and turn on Dependencies on the sheet, parent rows reflect a summary of their child rows. The parent row values are calculated automatically in the Duration, % Complete, Start Date and End date columns: 

  You can’t modify parent values. If dependencies are off, you can change the parent row information as needed. 

• Configure a % Complete column in the Project Settings dialog. Any time you enter a value in this column, you see it indicated in the task bar.
• Apply color to the task bars.