With Spreadsheet.com, you can quickly create interactive Gantt charts side-by-side with your spreadsheet data to visualize work schedules and relationships between tasks.
Gantt Views are a premium feature available on Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans. To learn more about Spreadsheet.com's paid plans, see our suite of articles on Billing, Payment, and Credit.
Gantt views add an interactive Gantt chart timeline to the right of your worksheet showing taskbars corresponding to each row in the table region. Gantt views are great for project management as they let you visualize dependent tasks, parent and child relationships, your project's critical path, and more.
In adding a Gantt view, you can transform a sheet view like this...
...into a layout like this:
This article features Spreadsheet.com's Product Launch Plan template. Explore the Template Gallery to find ready-to-use templates in over 20 different categories, or learn more about starting a new workbook from a Spreadsheet.com template.
Creating Gantt Views
Like all other view types, you can create a new Gantt view by opening the Views sidebar from the top navigation bar and clicking the + Gantt View button at the bottom of the sidebar
When you create a new Gantt view, the first thing Spreadsheet.com asks you to do is configure your Project Management settings. Project Management settings inform the relationship between the data in your Gantt view and the Gantt chart itself. Let's take a closer look at the Project Management Settings dialog.
Configuring Your Project Management Settings
With your Gantt view open, you can edit your Project Management settings at any time by clicking on the gear icon in the upper right corner of the workbook.
Clicking on the Project Management icon will open the Project Management dialog.
Under the "Enable project management" header at top, you can specify which worksheet column corresponds to which Gantt view feature, like start and end dates, durations, assigned users, and task status.
Columns selected for project management must remain as the data type required for project management features. For instance, you cannot change an end date column to the text data type.
Below, under the "Working days" header, you can specify which days of the week are designated as "working days" to accurately track task durations, as well as specify the start time and length of a working day.
At bottom, under the "Enable dependencies" header, you can toggle dependencies on and off and designate a column where predecessor tasks will be listed. We'll explore dependencies further later in this article.
Click the blue Save button in the bottom right hand corner to save your preferences and return to your Gantt view.
Managing Your Gantt View
Task Hierarchies
Individual tasks in your project plan may be components of overarching parent tasks. For example, "Product Plan" and "Marketing Plan" may be two separate scopes of work, each with their own set of child tasks. Task hierarchies differ from task dependencies in that parent tasks do not depend on child tasks, and the parent task is often not an individual task itself.
In the example below, "Launch Event Plan" (Row 10) is a child task of "Launch Schedule" (Row 9), which itself is a child task of "Product Plan" (Row 6) along with "Product Use Case Definition" and "Business Requirements" (Rows 7 and 8).
Note how parent tasks and child tasks differ visually in the Gantt chart. Some fields of parent tasks – like start and end dates and percent complete – cannot be edited directly, as they are functions of the relevant fields in their child tasks.
For more information about hierarchical relationships in Gantt views, check out our article on task hierarchies.
Expanding and Dragging Tasks
Each line in the Gantt chart corresponds to a row in your project plan and can be edited either in the worksheet or directly from the Gantt chart. Double-clicking on a line expands the line, just like expanding the row. Similarly, you can drag and drop lines to adjust their timing and duration, and the changes will be reflected in the respective columns.
Milestones
Setting a task's duration to 0 days will create a "milestone" notated as a diamond in your Gantt chart. Milestones are often used in projects as moments when you assess progress, like critical or intermediate checkpoints, or significant points in project completion.
Percent Complete
Lines in the Gantt chart can indicate the percent complete for a given row as a function of days remaining and project status. The percentage of the taskbar that is shaded corresponds with the percentage of the task completed as specified in your sheet.
In row hierarchies, parent cells automatically calculate their percentage complete as a function of all child cells' percentage complete.
Dependencies
Dependencies allow you to track tasks that must start after another task has finished. Dependencies can be established between tasks by dragging connections between taskbar antennae. When you create a new dependency directly on the Gantt chart, the relationship will be reflected in the "Predecessor" column.
Task dependencies are a premium feature available on Standard, Premium, and Enterprise plans. To learn more about Spreadsheet.com's paid plans, see our suite of articles on Billing, Payment, and Credit.
The Critical Path
The Critical path is the series of tasks that determines the duration of the project as a whole. Delays to critical path activities often translate to delays to the overall project, so project managers often find it helpful to easily identify those activities. Spreadsheet.com's Gantt views can automatically identify a project's critical path and highlight it on the Gantt chart. In the example below, the critical path and its dependency lines are highlighted in red.
You can toggle the critical path on or off by selecting the Critical path icon in the upper right corner of your workbook.
For more information about configuring and using the critical path feature, check out our article on Critical paths.
Changing Your Gantt Chart's Appearance
You can control how your Gantt chart looks by clicking the Gantt appearance icon in the upper right corner of your workbook.
Here, you can specify the columns used for the taskbar labels and colors, as well as toggle non-working days and hours, the today line, and dependency lines on and off.
You can also use the drag handle on the left side of your Gantt chart to make the Gantt chart wider or more narrow.
Publicly Sharing and Embedding Gantt Views
Just as you can share Spreadsheet.com workbooks with the general public, you can share individual Views with a public sharing link or by embedding them on websites that support iframes. Publicly shared Views are read-only, and you can choose to disable public sharing and embedding for any View at any time.
How to Access Public View Sharing and Embedding
- From the View sidebar, navigate to the View which you want to share
- Click the pink Share button in the upper right corner and select Share view from the dropdown
- Configure your settings in the Public View sharing and embedding dialog
You can configure options for your publicly shared Gantt View from the Public View sharing and embedding dialog.
- Enable public sharing and embedding: Toggle this checkbox to enable and disable public sharing and embedding for your current View
- View toolbar settings: Choose which toolbar options are available for viewers to use in the shared View
- View settings: Choose whether or not column letters and the table header region region rows are visible in your shared View, as well as choose to show just the Gantt chart or the Gantt charts and worksheet rows
- [Coming Soon] Allow users to copy this view: Choose whether or not viewers can create their own Spreadsheet.com workbook from a copy of your View
Once you’ve configured your options as needed, use the public share link to share your View with the public, or the embed code to embed your View in any website or app that supports iframes.
Read on through the rest of our articles on Views and View Types to learn more about each of the view types Spreadsheet.com offers, as well as more information about locking views, changing view permissions, and managing your existing views. For a deeper dive into Gantt views and Project Management settings, see our suite of articles on Project Management.