How to Draw a Gantt Chart in PowerPoint

This practical guide walks through how to draw a gantt chart in PowerPoint, explains the main requirements, and highlights common issues that may appear along the way.

Create a new Gantt chart in PowerPoint

To get started, open the Microsoft PowerPoint app and select the ' New ' tab in the options pane on the left.

In the template search box, enter the keyword ' Gantt Chart ' and press ' Enter '.

There will be 5 Gantt chart templates appearing in search results. Choose the template best suited to your project by clicking on the chart. In this example, we will use a template named ' Blue Two Year Gantt Chart '.

There are 5 Gantt chart patterns

After clicking to select the template, a window will immediately appear, showing you a preview of the selected template. Click ' Create '.

You can now begin to customize the Gantt chart that appears on the first slide in PowerPoint.

Customization start

First, edit the title areas to reflect your project's content, including the corresponding timelines (Year) and tasks (Tasks). To do this, just click in the text box and type in the text you want.

Edit column headers

The icons in the top left and bottom right corner of the Gantt chart represent (1) the start date and (2) the release date of the project. You can edit timelines by clicking on the date, then entering the start date and release date of the project respectively.

When you've finished editing the content, you can switch to adjusting the length (which represents the duration of the task / project) of the taskbars. To do this, click on the taskbar you want and drag to adjust the length accordingly. You can also adjust the start / stop markers by clicking and dragging them to their respective positions.

Change the Gantt chart colors

To change the colors to match the spirit of your project or company logo, click to select the item for which you want to correct the color. Then navigate to the ' Format ' tab , click on ' Shape Styles ' and choose ' Shape Fill '. From the drop-down menu that appears, choose the color you want to use.

There are also other nice customization options, such as changing the color of the border by selecting a color in 'Shape Outline'. Or you can even add advanced effects, such as shadows, by selecting the desired effect under ' Shape Effect '.

That's all it takes to create a Gantt chart in PowerPoint. How to design the chart depends on what you want. But the general rule of thumb is to follow the spirit of the project, and keep the chart as intuitive as possible by adding only what's needed.