Easy 3D Gantt Charts in Excel (4 minutes) – Project Management & Scheduling Tools
Channel: Engineering Management Academy Dr Mehrdad Arashpour
Date: 2024-03-07

In this video of #engineeringmanagementacademy #excel is used to draw 3D #GanttCharts by #drmehrdadarashpour  
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❎ Excel workbook: https://bit.ly/Excel_Gantt_Chart
▶ RELATED VIDEOS: https://youtu.be/AkjuzsbPzSI
⌛ TIMESTAMPS
0:00 - Introduction to Gantt Charts 
0:28 - First Simple Experiment
0:52 - Step 1 (Calculate Activity Start Dates based on the network logic)
1:30 - Step 2 (Create a 3D stacked bar chart in Excel)
2:12 – Step 3 (Format the bar chart as a proper Gantt Chart)
3:07 – Final Enhancements
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Gantt Charts are very useful in project scheduling. Today, we’ll be using Excel to build them…
In a previous video, we provided a brief overview of project time management using Gantt charts. The link to that video can be found in the description below (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkjuzsbPzSI). Now, we want to draw Gantt Charts using Excel spreadsheets. Although Excel does not directly support drawing Gantt Charts, we can easily use stacked bar charts to create 3D Gantts, which look professional on any project report. You can follow along by getting the Excel workbook via the provided link in the description below. https://bit.ly/Excel_Gantt_Chart
Let’s first experiment with a small set of activities for which durations are specified. Select the two columns of data, and from the “Insert” menu and “Charts” section, choose a 3-D stacked bar. Excel creates a chart for you, which unfortunately has a couple of issues. All activities are started at the same date and relationships among them are not captured correctly. So, let’s get rid of this chart and follow three simple steps to plot a proper Gantt Chart.

Step 1 is to Calculate the start date of each activity based on the project network logic.
In this example, we can assume a desirable start date for the first project activity. We have chosen 30th of April to kick off “Activity A”. Since this activity has a duration of one and it is a predecessor for Activity B, the start of “Activity B” will be on 1st of May. The same condition applies to “Activity C”. The next activity has two predecessors, B & C. The start time for “Activity D” will be the latest finish date for the two, which is the 4th of May. Finally, “Activity E” will be starting on 6th May. This concludes the first step in creating our project Gantt Chart in Excel.

Step 2 is to Create a 3D stacked bar chart in Excel. 
We should click on an empty cell, and from the “Insert” menu and “Charts” section, choose “3-D stacked bar”. Now right click on the blank chart and from the menu choose “select data”. Then, we can add our first series. For its name, “start date” is selected and for the values, the five dates are chosen. After that, our second series is added. For its name, we choose “Duration” and for the values, five activity durations. Our final task here is to Edit “axis labels”, which should appear as activity names. For the axis label range, we choose our activities, A to E. This concludes the second step in creating our project Gantt Chart in Excel.

Step 3 is to Format the bar chart as a proper Gantt Chart 
First, we can align the five activities with our tabular data. Double click on the activity labels and from the “Format Axis” menu, choose “categories in reverse order”. Next, we should get rid of the blue segments for each activity bar since only durations must be shown. For that, right-click on a blue bar and from the “Format Data Series” menu, choose “No Fill” to hide the information related to “start dates”. After that, we can shift the bars to the left of our diagram, by double-clicking on dates and changing the minimum bound. Unfortunately, Excel uses a “General format” instead of the actual date. However, there is a workaround procedure that we can apply. Copy the start date for our first activity and paste it into an empty cell. Right click on that and from “Format cells” choose “General” format. Now, we can use this value as the minimum axis bound. We have now formatted our Gantt Chat properly, but from the quick layout menu, you may want to enhance its appearance. Choose a good option like this one. I also like my Gantt chart to have a hatch pattern instead of a solid fill. So I need to double click on a bar and under “fill & Line” tab, pattern fill is chosen. You may want to remove the title since figures should have a stand-alone caption in a proper project report. 
And there you have it: a proper Gantt Chart drawn using 3 simple steps in Microsoft Excel. Again, you can access the Excel workbook via the link. https://bit.ly/Excel_Gantt_Chart