Stories for Project Managers: Visualize and track your projects effectively

The easiest way to visualize a project plan to better track it is to use a "Gantt Chart"

Since there is no ready-made Gantt Chart in Excel 2016, I will show you how to do it step by step to get the same chart in the picture.

Step 1: Input all the project phases with a start date and end date for each phase.

Step 2: Add another column for the Duration where the values there are the difference between the end date and start date

Step 3: Select all the start dates and go to Insert -> Insert Column or Bar Chart -> 2-D Bar -> Stacked Bar

Step 4: In the Chart Tools tab, go to Design -> Select Data -> Add -> Series values, then delete ={1} and select the duration column we added in Step 2 (without the header).

Step 5: To add the name of each phase to the chart, go to Select Data -> Edit (on the right hand side) -> Select the phase column from Step 1 (without the header).

Step 6: We only need the top portion of the bars, so select the lower portions by clicking on any one of them then press Ctrl+1 to go to the Format options.

Step 7: In the Format Data Series, go to Fill & Line -> No Fill

Step 8: To adjust the dates in the X-Axis to improve the design of the Gantt Chart, click on the horizontal axis, press Ctrl+1 to go to the format options.

Step 9: In Axis Options, you'll see Minimum and Maximum. These figures indicate the date. If you know which date you need to add as a minimum and which as a maximum, type the dates in separate cells in the excel worksheet and then format them as a number.
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Step 10: Copy and Paste the min and max dates from Step 9 to the Axis options.