A project is a onetime activity that can span over varying length of time. A project could be an activity that can finish in a day or it could cover months and years. Project management is the process of managing this activity. As the complexity of the project increases, it becomes more and more difficult to manage it, hence require more and more skilled people. However, whatever be the project and however is handling it, one tool is always there to help them – that is called Gantt chart or simply the project timeline.

In this post, we will discuss methods that can be used to have a project time line in Excel. The question might be asked why to use excel when there are specialized software available for project time lines. The answer is simple, the cost of such software some time way more than one can afforded for minor projects. Or even if the software and less expensive, it might have a steep learning curve. Hence people revert to the use of MS Excel for project management.

How does a project time line look?

Most of the project time lines or Gantt charts have activities on the right hand side and the date line on the top of the table. This makes it easier to list down all the activities one by one. Using, the activities are sub divided into smaller activities and still smaller activities – this is called the Work breakdown Structure of a project.

The Gantt chart uses indentation to mark sub activities. Sometimes number separated by a decimal place is used to show the hierarchy. The activities column is followed by two more columns that describe start and the end date of the activity. Here is a sample of how does a Gantt chart look like.

Creating your own project time line:

Various website offer ready to use templates for project time line, but we can also create our own as per our personal requirements. In the following lines, we will understand how to create the above project line.

Step 1 – Work Breakdown Structure

Make sure you have one! Without WBS, it is difficult to plan a Gantt chart, if not available, you can create some dummy activities just to fill the space. It will make it easier to understand the flow of the process. You can use either indentation for creating hierarchy of activities or use consecutive column to put in different activities.

In our case, we have used different column to put in the sub activities.

Step – 2 Have a Stand and End Date Column

The start and the end date describes the start and end date for all the levels of the activity. The start and end date for main activity should encompass all sub activities and tasks. There two possibilities to create end date and start date in Gantt chart:

1. Put start and end date manually.
2. Put start date and enter number of days required for that activity to complete. The end date can be obtained by adding the number of such day.

End Date = Start Date + Days Required To Finish the Job

In our case, we have entered the values manually.

Step – 3 Creating Header Row with Dates:

This is amongst the most important part of creating a project time line, because without dates, it will not give us our desired result. We start with a date and then keeping adding one to it so that it progresses automatically.

Thus in G2, we put the first date manually, and from it onward to the right, the date is calculated by adding one to the proceeding one. G3 becomes G2+1, G4 = G3+1 and so on.

Step – 4 Showing the activity with shaded area.

One done with these three steps, the next and the most critical step is show the activity progress by shading some cells. For smaller projects with less frequent steps, we can do this task manually. But in case you want your activities progress to be date dependent then will require some excel understanding.

In order to make progress date dependent, we will make use of conditional formatting menu.

We use and IF() function with AND() to get our desired result. The formula works by evaluating the AND() function. This function checks if the date in the header row lies in date bracket of start and end date. If it lies, the formula will return 1 and else will give 0.

For example taking up the first cell, in G3, the formula is evaluated in the following manner.

=IF(AND(G$2>=$E3,G$2<=$F3),1,””)

The first part to be evaluated in G$2>=$E3, G2 is in the header column,  this compared the time line value in cell G2 with start date in E3, we have fixed row referencing style for G2 and fixed column refereeing style for E3, as we will be dragging the formula, rightwards and downwards.

The second part of the formula G$2<=$F3 will compare if the time line value is less than the end date. If yes then AND() will return a TRUE, the formula only works when we have both TRUE. The result will be a table with 1 and 0.

You can see he progress in form of arrays of 1 in rows.

Step – 5 Applying Conditional Formatting

Now we will use these 1s and 0s for conditionally formatting cells.

1. Select the entire range from G3:AK13.
2. Go to Conditional Formatting Dialogue Box and select Rule Manager.
3. From there select New Rule. This will make a new rule.
4. Using New Rule, select the last options from dialogue box that sets criteria for cells to be formatted based on cell value.
5. Select formatting from same dialogue box – select a color to fill and the same color for font in the cells.
6. Remove fixed cell referencing from the formula section.

7. The formula should be =G3=1 that means that when applied it will have all the cells that are equal to 1.
8. Press Ok to exist the dialogue box, press on one again and press Apply to apply the formatting.

Once done the final output should look like.

Conclusion:

You can see that cell, with value 1 are only filled with color creating the project time line effect. The entire cell there had zero are now blank. In this ways we can create the project timeline in excel. Please download this file to see how things works and create your own time line

The post Creating Project Timeline or Gantt Chart with MS Excel appeared first on Excel Zoom.

Though there many “dedicated” application available for project managers to manage their projects, like MS Project or Primavera Project Planner, we can also create a project time line in MS Excel! In today’s tutorial, we will be exploring the ways to create a project time line in excel, along with the terminology and some theoretical background of project management.

So, what is Project Management?

A project can be defined as an activity targeted to achieve a preset target with marked limitation within a given time frame and cost budget. Managing a budget is critical as the resources are scarce – time, people, financial resource. A little delay can lead to problem or even project failure.  Hence a project management tools is highly desirable.

What is work break down structure in project?

The project activities can be broken down into smaller step or set of activities that will eventually execute the project. A work breakdown structure makes it easy for manage to complete the project. It shows the precedence of activities in a project.

What is a Milestone in a project?

A milestone marks the completion of an activity in a project. As we have crated work units in work breakdown structure, their completion is marked with a Milestone in project. Let’s take up an example and see how we can produce a project time line:

Example:

Consider a family that is planning to construct their home. They consult a Civil Engineer that gives them following action plan to build their home:

In the above chart, there are some activities that are dependent on others and some will start at the same time.

Let’s setup a sheet and see how we can produce a timeline. As a starting point we must remember that project timeline has activities on the left hand side and the time on the top horizontal axis.

On the time horizon we will mark each cell with a date and then fill the color accordingly to make a Gantt chart or project line effect. On the project sheet will mark a start date and then the time horizon will move day by day as in the following picture:

This has been done by manually filling the cells to create a project line. But we will be discussing a formula that will take start and the end dates and will do the needful.

The formula for filling up the cells:

As we know that there is no formula that can fill the cells with a color, we have to take help of conditional formatting. The conditional formatting will work on the logic that if the cell contains certain value, the cell will be filled by the color and vice versa.

So let’s assume that cells with value of 1 will be highlighted and anything else will not be. Let’s create a formula that will fill the chart with 1s for date ranges.

The formula:

The formula that we will be using is:

=IF(F$5>=$C7,IF(F$5<=$D7,1,""),"")

…is present in the cell F7 of the sheet Gantt chart.

 Understanding formula:

The formula works by comparing the start date that is present in C7 for being greater than or equal to F5 that is a date on the time line. The formula still goes on and tests the second criteria that if the end date is less than the date in the D7. This makes sure that we only get 1 in the cells that are within the date bracket of the activity. Everything else will have a blank space in the cell.

Now let’s understand the cell referencing in the formula.

1. The dollar sign in F$5 means that when we move formula downward, the cell will still refer to the time line date by not changing the cell reference. However the cell reference will change when we move it rightwards.
2. The dollar sign in $C7 makes sure the when we drag the formula right ward, the formula still refers to the start date that is present in column C7 but he reference may change when we move it downward.
3. The dollar sign in $D7 does the same function as that of $C7.

Understanding Conditional Formatting:

The initial step is to:

1. Select the cell F7.
2. Go to Conditional formatting menu: Conditional Formatting > Manage Rule > New Rule > Use a formula to determine which cell to format. This will lead you to following menu with following space for a formula:
3. In this space we will write the condition that where ever there is 1 it should be formatted (color filled etc) and rest should be left as it is. Here is the formula.

The default format when you select the cell is $F$7 but we need to make reference relative so we will remove dollar sign from it.

4. In the same dialogue box where we have entered the criteria for highlighting cells, we have a tab to format the text, as shown in the following picture.

From this dialogue box we will format cell to be:

1. Filled with red color
2. The font color should also be red so that 1s are not visible.
3. Once done, press ok to close the format dialogue box, press apply to apply it to the selected range and again press OK to close the conditional formatting dialogue box. The final result should look like this:

Conclusion:

This has created a simple project line also called Gantt chart for project management. Please download file from this link and see how formulas in the sheet actually work.

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