How to Format a Gantt Chart in Microsoft Project 2016
Watch the Microsoft Project 2016 video tutorial below and learn the different methods of formatting a Gantt Chart. We will show you how to format a Gantt Chart manually or by using the wizard.
Watch the free video here. The transcripts for the entire video follow:
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Video Transcripts:
Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016. In this section, we’re going to take a look at Gantt Chart formatting.
This is a topic on which we could spend an awful lot of time. I don’t propose to spend more time on it but I do intend to introduce you to some of the basic principles of formatting.
And then, if you need to format your Gantt Charts extensively, I’ll leave you to experiment with many of the tools that are available in Project 2016.
Now, when it comes to formatting you really have two major options. There is a high level tool called the Gantt Chart Wizard which can do an awful lot of heavy formatting for you and come up with pretty smart standard styles for Gantt Charts that can be very good for fitting in say as part of a presentation where you’re preparing other parts of the presentation in other tools.
And then there is what you might call the manual approach to formatting a Gantt Chart. We’ve done a little bit of the manual approach already. I’ve demonstrated things like changing the font in a column. But the range of tools for manually formatting a Gantt Chart is actually quite impressive. I’m going to show you a couple of examples of manual formatting and then as I say I’ll leave you to it.
Now before we get started here is an important point. If you’re going to work on formatting a Gantt Chart, in fact if you’re going to work on formatting any view, changing the layout, even changing the timescale and so on, unless you’re just doing a small temporary job and you know what you’re doing and you may want to leave things as they are or maybe just do an Undo to go back to where you were.
If you’re planning to do something that may be a major change it’s a very good idea not to work on the particular view, in this case say a Gantt Chart View, but to work on a copy of it so that you can always go back to the original. Now I ought to qualify that just a little by the fact that if you look at the View Tab, Task Views Group on the left where the Gantt Chart button is.
If you click on the dropdown at the bottom one of the options is Reset to Default. Now you might think well that will do the job for me. If all goes wrong I can reset to the default. And to some extent that’s true. The problem is that the default really is the default when you got Project out of the box if you like. So if you’ve done some formatting some time ago, you’ve been working on your formatted version for some time and then you do a second batch of changes say and you want to go back to where you were after the first batch, Reset to Default won’t do that.
It’ll take you right back to the beginning again. So if I’m going to work in this case on Gantt Chart View and I want to make some changes to it I would normally make a copy of it and work on the copy. Now I’ll come back to that in a few minutes time. Let’s concentrate now on the Gantt Chart Wizard.
What you’re about to see is that the Gantt Chart Wizard is very easy to use but you’ll also see that it’s not quite so easy to find. It’s not actually on the Ribbon by default. And for some reason which is still unknown to me Microsoft make it one of the items that’s not shown on the Ribbon.
And in order to use it the first thing you want to do really is to either put it on the Ribbon or to put it on the Quick Access Toolbar. I’m going to add it to the Quick Access Toolbar. So I go up to the dropdown at the right hand end, click on More Commands. In the category Commands not in the Ribbon one of them is Gantt Chart Wizard. There it is. Click on Add. It’s now added to my Quick Access Toolbar. Click on OK and it appears on the Quick Access Toolbar.
Now let’s take it out for a spin. Let’s start Gantt Chart Wizard. This is a short series of screens in which you make some fairly straightforward choices. It’s quite a high level tool the Gantt Chart Wizard. But if you want to do something quickly that will give you pretty smart results it is a good option.
So first of all let’s say Next. What kind of information do you want to display? Do we want standard information? Do we want to show the critical path? Do we want to show the baseline? Or do we want to show something else? Or do we want to actually show a custom Gantt Chart? Now I will let you experiment yourself with some of these other options. We’re going to go for standard. Click on Next.
What task information do you want to display with your Gantt Bars? The information that it’s referring to here is the words that are on the right hand side of each bar. And until now we’ve not really looked at why those particular words are there and in fact how you can control which words are shown. But for the purposes of this exercise I’m going to say that I don’t want any words to appear. I’m going to say None.
Note that I could have resources and dates, resources, or dates. I can also specify custom task information. Once again I’ll leave you to experiment with that. Click on Next. Do you want to show link lines between dependent tasks? Note that when you’re doing this you’re getting a preview of how things are going to look in this box on the left.
So in this step you can already see that the word have been removed but the little lines are still shown to show the dependencies. If I select No the lines are no longer shown. I’m going to leave the dependency lines shown. Click on Next. And that’s it really. And then I just click on Format it. It chugs away for a moment or two. Click on Exit Wizard and there is my Gantt Chart formatted according to the choices that I’ve made. So that’s a very, very straightforward way of formatting a Gantt Chart.
So that’s the quick way of doing it. And as I say you get pretty smart results. Let’s now look at some aspects of manual formatting. Just before I do let’s undo what we’ve just done. So I’m just going to click the Undo button there. We’re back to where we were.
What I’m going to do first here is make a copy of the current Gantt Chart View. So if I click on Other Views, More Views, with Gantt Chart selected if I click on Copy it will make a copy of that. Give my new view a name. I’m going to call it TA Gantt Chart. My initials in there makes it easy for anybody else using this installation to know who has created a particular view. Click on OK. That new view now exists and I’m going to apply it.
Don’t forget you can check which view is currently applied by looking down on the left had edge here to the left of where the table is. And I’ve still got my original Gantt Chart to revert back to at any time if I need to. Now let’s set about doing some formatting of this view, this Gantt Chart View.
First of all let’s do a little bit of formatting of the table. Note that it’s currently the Entry Table. What I’m going to do is to select all of the columns from task name to predecessors and I’m going to Best Fit all of those columns. So I’m going to go to Field Settings. I’m going to say Best Fit and the widths of all of those columns are adjusted accordingly.
I’m then going to hide the predecessors list but leave the duration field there. I’m going to hide the work field and just so start and finish. Okay. And then I think what I’ll do is I will Center Align the contents of the finish column.
And then finally as far as the total is concerned let me just illustrate a very important point here. If I select a number of entries here. Let’s suppose that I chose all of the text under the attire summary task. And if I right click to bring up the contextual menu and the mini toolbar. What if I change the font from Calibri to say Blackoak (Standard)? What you can see, that looks absolutely horrible of course, is that I have changed the font, style, size, etcetera for the selected fields, the selected entries in the selected columns.
Let me just undo that again. But if I wanted to change all of the text to that font no matter where I put the cursor, whatever selection I make, if I click on Text Styles on the Format Tab in the Gantt Chart Tools, let me choose that same font again, click on OK. That applies to all of the text.
So a Test Style change changes the text everywhere. Now I’m not suggesting that’s a good choice for this particular Gantt Chart but there’s a difference between changing individual items or selections and changing a style. So let me undo that as well.
Now let’s take a look at a couple of aspects of formatting the chart itself on the right. First of all there is a Gantt Chart Style Gallery on the Format Tab and you can choose the style of Gantt Chart that you want. Now there are quite a few styles. We’ve got scheduling styles and we’ve got presentation styles. Let me try one or two of the presentation styles. And you might want to experiment with some of those to see which you like the most.
And in general terms one of the key things here as we just saw with the table on the left is that you can either choose to style a particular bar or to change the style of all bars of a particular type. So in the Bar Styles Group, left there there is a Format button. If you click on the bottom of that you can format a bar which is a specific bar that you’ve selected or you can format Bar Styles.
In this case let’s take a look at formatting Bar Styles. If I click on Bar Styles it brings up this rather complex looking dialogue where we can format just about every possible aspect of those bars.
Now first of all we have different types of object. So we have straightforward task objects, we have splits, we have milestones, summary tasks, the project summary task, etcetera. Now with each of these we can choose its appearance and we can view or in some cases change various aspects of how the bar appears.
So let’s say take our standard task which is what most of these bars represent. You can see the color there. You’ve got that appearance. If I wanted to change the appearance I’ve got a number of ways that I could change it. For instance, at the moment there is no start symbol. If I click on the list of start symbols, supposing I wanted a start symbol that was say like that. And then I wanted the same shape at the end.
I wanted that at the end as well. Watch what happens if I click on OK. All my bars now have that same start and end symbol. Let’s go back into Bar Styles again. So that’s an example of what you can do to start and end shapes. Let’s look at this middle section here, Shape, pattern and color. Supposing I wanted to make the pattern different, supposing I wanted to make it stripey like that, so vertical stripes.
See how that looks? Okay. And then finally as an example of that what about the text that appears on the right? I’ve talked about that earlier on in the section where we were talking about the Gantt Chart Wizard. If I click on the Text Tab here, currently it says, On the left of the bar there’s no text. On the right there are the resource names. Top nothing, bottom nothing, etcetera. Supposing that instead of resource names I’m going to show, what about cost? Click on OK. Now what I can see against each bar is the cost of that task.
So you can probably see from that just how flexible the formatting of Gantt Charts can be. You’ve got the style, you’ve got the ability to change the color, the shapes, the ends, the text on all the charts, and you can also do things like change the way that summary tasks are shown. So I’m going to leave you to experiment with that.
That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
