How to Draw a Gantt Chart
Simple tutorial help you learn how to draw a Gantt chart for your project Schedule and increase you possibilities of understanding and work more effective with our Gantt Chart Software
Preparatory Work for Drawing a Gantt Chart
A good job should be done in the preparatory work for a new projects. You need turn your project into a step-by-step plan and list the activities in a table. For each activity on your list, estimate how long it will take you to do that thing. How long are you going to be in the thing? Realistically, how many work can you do in a day? When will people be available?
Then you need put activities in order. What is the first thing that you are going to do? What will you do next? What will you do after that? One by one, put everything in order. Make a note of any dependencies; that is, situations where you can not do one thing until another is started or finished. If the research assistant is going to do all the interviews, then the interviews can not start until the research assistant is hired.
When you finished the ordered list and knew how long everything will take, you need to combine or divide the task for reducing the list without losing any specificity.
How to Draw a Gantt Chart
Open the Gantt Chart Template from the Project Management library. There is three basic Gantt chart templates available for week-day Gantt chart, month-day Gantt chart and year-month Gantt chart. How you divide up your time depends on your project. If it is only one year long, you might list items by month. If your project is three years long, then you might list items by quarter. If you are planning over five years, you might break it down to six-month periods.
Drag a Gantt chart shape from Gantt library to start your Gantt chart.
You can move the yellow control handle in the Gantt chart shape to change the column interval.
Add a Task in Gantt Chart
While selecting the whole the shape, you can click the action button in the right edge to modify Gantt as you want.
As the above image shown, you can set the time period, interval days for whole Gantt chart template. You can add a new task or delete a task. You can show or hide the task priority, duration, completed, project cost, reserved item and flag options.
Add a Subtask in Gantt Chart
You can select a task then click its action button to add a subtask after it.
As the above image shown, you are not worry about putting the tasks in the exact correct order in the beginning. It is easy to re-organize them later on. You can move up or move down the task in a same task priority. You can bring it to the sub level task of the previous task.
Modify the Task Priority
The Gantt chart software allow to show or hide task priority option. Select the whole Gantt chart template then check or uncheck the Show Priority item in the action button menu. You can change the priority by clicking the circle.
How to Change the Time Line in a Task
While double clicking the text editing box to input task start date and finish date, the progress bar will be updated automatically according to new date. Also you can drag yellow handles of progress bar to change the start date, finish date and duration.
Select a task, there will be two yellow handles, drag the handles to change the length of the progress bar. Then the start date, finish date and duration will be changed automatically.
Input the task completed percentage, the green progress bar will be upgraded automatically.
Different Task Type in Gantt Chart
There are three type different task type in the Gantt chart: Normal, Summary and Milestone.
You don't have to set the type explicitly. The Gantt chart software will process it automatically. The normal task has a completed percentage. You can set it as the above description. If a task has some subtasks, the task will become as a summary. A milestone task can be a diamond shape which while you drag the two yellow control point together.
Share the Gantt Chart
When you complete the Gantt chart, you can save it as the project file for revision later. You can print it or export it as the html, pdf, svg, transparent png format. You can also export it to MS Word, Excel or PowerPoint with one click. See a svg format export effect: How to Draw a Gantt Chart
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