Gantt Chart & Timeline Center

HOW TO DRAW GANTT CHARTS (cont'd)

Seven Tips for Effective Gantt Charts

1) Make your Gantt chart easy to read by color coding your task bars. For example, if all the marketing tasks are blue and all the production tasks are red, it will be easier to identify department responsibilities at a glance.

2) Include a legend below your chart (or on a separate page) explaining the colors of the bars and the meaning of any milestone markers.

3) Keep your Gantt chart concise by excluding trivial sub-steps. If a task needs to be analyzed in greater detail, create a second Gantt chart and hyperlink to it from the main chart.

Simply select the object you want to link and choose Hyperlink from the Insert tab. Once the object is hyperlinked, a small plus sign will appear on its upper right hand corner.

4) Give a copy of the Gantt Chart to each team member and review responsibilities and milestones. To preserve your formatting and text as your chart passes from person to person, you can turn off the text editing property in the Table tab under the Data group.

5) Update the chart periodically to reflect the realities of your ongoing project. You can draw a vertical line down your Gantt chart to indicate the present time and identify which tasks are ahead of schedule and which tasks are behind schedule.

6) You can export your Gantt chart as a JPEG or a GIF image for the web, or you can save your chart as an HTML document (with working hyperlinks) and publish it on an Intranet or over the World Wide Web.

7) Create a professional presentation using SmartDraw and PowerPoint^®. You can export your drawing into any of the programs in the Microsoft Office^® Suite.

If you paste your chart into another program (such as PowerPoint^®), you can edit it by simply double-clicking on the chart in the other program. This automatically opens the chart in SmartDraw for editing, and your changes will be updated in the other program. More info