New in this release · Critical path · Schedule to the minute

The Gantt chart that lives inside Excel.

A free Gantt chart Excel template that actually schedules. Add tasks, link them, and the plan maintains itself — dates move when something slips, the critical path recalculates, and progress rolls up on its own. No subscription, no new tool to learn: it all happens inside the Excel you already have.

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  • 4.9/5 · 144 reviews
  • 8,960,000+ downloads
  • Windows & Mac
  • 11 languages
Gantt Excel — the Oakfield Villa Build project plan in Microsoft Excel, showing task dependencies, milestones, percent complete and a timeline across August and September 2026

What you get

A real project planner, in a file you already know how to open

It stays on your computer. Anyone you send it to can open it. Nothing to log into.

  • Dependencies that actually schedule

    Link tasks once. Move one date and everything downstream moves with it — no dragging bars, no re-typing.

  • Critical path & float

    See the chain that decides your finish date, and exactly how much room every other task has.

  • Hours to years

    Seven views, one click apart — and hourly charts that schedule to the nearest whole minute.

  • Baselines & actuals

    Compare the original plan, today's estimate and what really happened, side by side.

  • Resources & costs

    Assign people, set each one's working calendar, and track budget in the same sheet.

  • Dashboard & export

    One click to a dashboard, a web report, or a PDF for people who don't live in Excel.

The ribbon

Everything lives in one Excel tab

Gantt Excel adds a single Gantt Excel tab to the ribbon you already use. Build the chart, add tasks and milestones, switch views, assign resources and export — without ever leaving the spreadsheet.

The Gantt Excel tab in the Microsoft Excel ribbon: Add New Gantt Chart, Edit Project, Dashboard, Add Task, Add Milestone, Edit, Duplicate, Delete, Make Parent, Make Child, Move Up, Move Down, Daily View, More Views, Resources, Settings, Export to PDF, Export to XLSX and About.

Try it yourself

Interactive demo — take the guided tour below

Explore a real project below. Hover any task, milestone or numbered marker to see what Gantt Excel does — dependencies, the critical path, budgets, resources and live dates, all built right into your spreadsheet.

Gantt Excel allows you to visualize and track every step of your project, from start to finish.
You can create tasks, link them using dependencies, and then track their progress against deadlines and milestones.

Auto-scheduling

Change one date. The rest follows.

This is the difference between a Gantt chart and a picture of one.

  • Finish-to-start, start-to-start, finish-to-finish and start-to-finish links
  • Lag and lead time on any link
  • Summary tasks roll up their children automatically
  • Working calendars respected per resource, so weekends and holidays don't lie to you
Linking tasks with dependencies
Foundation slips by two days
Week 1Week 2Week 3 TASK Foundation Ground floor Walls Handover +2d
Where it used to sit After the slip — every linked task moved itself Milestone

Critical path

Know which tasks you can’t afford to slip

Switch on Show Critical Path and every task with no room left gets a red outline. Everything else gets a number telling you exactly how much room it has — so you know where to push, and where you can afford to wait.

A Gantt chart inside Excel with the critical path picked out in red. Requirements, Design, Development, Testing and the Launch milestone each show a Total Float of 0 and Critical = Yes. Content draft and Vendor review sit off the chain as plain blue bars with 3 and 5 days of float.
  • Five columns, not a colour

    Turning it on adds five read-only columns: Late Start, Late Finish, Total Float, Free Slack and Critical. The two above are the ones you’ll read most — how much room a task has, and whether it has any at all.

  • One rule, no mystery

    A task is critical when its Total Float is zero. That’s the whole rule — nothing is hidden in a black box you have to take on trust.

  • Arrows that mean something

    Dependency arrows turn red only when both linked tasks are critical. An arrow running into a task that still has float keeps its normal colour.

  • Float you can believe

    Float is measured against each resource’s own working calendar. A gap that looks like breathing room counts for nothing if those aren’t working days.

How the critical path works

Dashboards

One click turns the plan into a status report

Press Dashboard and pick your format: a standalone web page you can send to anyone, or a dashboard built inside the workbook. Both read the plan you already have. Neither needs setting up.

The Gantt Excel web report for the Oakfield Villa Build: 41% complete weighted by task duration, at-a-glance tiles for tasks, completed, overdue, finish date, days remaining and estimated cost, and donut charts breaking the project down by status and by priority.

A single HTML file. It opens in any browser, on any machine, with nothing installed and no account to create — and it carries the cost summary, resource load and milestone list that will never fit on a Gantt chart.

How the dashboard works

Plan and track

The plan you promised, next to what actually happened

Save a baseline once. From then on the chart carries three sets of dates at the same time — what you committed to, what you now expect, and what really happened. The slippage is something you can see, not something you reconstruct from memory.

One task on a Gantt Excel timeline drawn three times over: a baseline bar running 7 to 14 August, an estimated bar for Testing running to 18 August, and an actual bar running to 21 August, with an amber Launch Date milestone on 24 August.
  • Baseline — what you committed to
  • Estimated — what you expect now
  • Actual — what really happened
  • Milestone
  • Save it once

    Set the baseline when the plan is agreed. Everything after that is measured against it, so nobody has to remember what the original date was.

  • Three bars, one row

    Baseline, estimate and actual sit on the same line. A task that slipped looks like a task that slipped — you don’t have to read a variance column to notice.

  • Milestones you can defend

    Mark the dates that matter and watch them move, or hold. Build a milestone-only chart for the people who need the headlines and not the detail.

Baselines and actuals in the guide

Languages

Gantt Excel speaks eleven languages

Change it in Settings and the whole interface follows — ribbon, tooltips, dialogs, column headers, dropdowns. Your project stays as you wrote it: task names, notes and resource names are never translated.

  • English
  • Español (España)
  • Español (Latinoamérica)
  • Français
  • Português (Portugal)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Deutsch
  • Nederlands
  • Italiano
  • 日本語
  • 简体中文

Reviews

What people actually say

4.9 out of 5 from 144 reviews · collected and verified by Shopper Approved