Skip to primary navigation Skip to content Skip to primary sidebarPeltier Tech BlogPeltier Tech Excel Charts and Programming BlogSearch this websitePeltier Tech ConsultingExcel Chart Add-InsAdvanced Excel TrainingTwitterFacebookEmail FeedRSSError Bar Gantt ChartThursday, May 30, 2019 by Jon Peltier Leave a Comment Thursday, May 30, 2019  by Jon Peltier Peltier Technical Services, Inc., Copyright © 2019, All rights reserved. Floating Bars and Gantt ChartsGantt charts are a special kind of floating bar chart used in scheduling and program management. A list of tasks or activities is plotted along the left hand axis, and dates along the bottom axis. Floating horizontal bars indicate when tasks begin and end, and which tasks are in progress at any given time.In Floating Bars in Excel Charts I showed several ways to produce vertical or horizontal floating bars in Excel charts, including stacked bar and column charts, XY Scatter chart line segments formatted with thick lines, and error bars formatted with thick lines.My article Custom Error Bars in Excel describes how to customize error bar values, and I’ve used the error bar-floating bar technique in many ways, such as the recent article that showcased Low-Medium-High charts.In Gantt Charts in Microsoft Excel, I shared a couple ways to make Gantt charts, including the use of Conditional Formatting to shade cells in the worksheet (which doesn’t actually produce a chart), and the use of floating bar charts to produce the timeline bars.This tutorial will show how to use custom error bars to create a Gantt chart in Microsoft Excel. It’s also a case study of features in Excel charts, and how to go about designing your own non-native chart in Excel. You’ll see me encounter a few false starts, not unusual as I zero in on a working protocol.XY Scatter Error Bar Gantt ChartMy first approach with almost any non-native custom chart starts with an XY Scatter chart, and make adjustments from there. My plan is to use XY points as the endpoints of the timeline bars, applying negative horizontal error bars to the points, and adding data labels with task names to the right of the points.Below is the minimal data needed for the chart I envisioned, in A1:D9. I need columns for Task (a label), End Date (the X values of my points), Height (the Y values of my points), and Duration (the lengths of the timeline bars). I have eight tasks, which I want vertically distributed evenly in the chart. This formula in cell C2, copied into C3:C9, does the trick:=1-(ROW()-0.5-ROW(E$1))/COUNTA($A$2:$A$9)I have included a small satellite data region in F1:G4, with two dates in column F (the desired endpoints of my horizontal axis), and the same dates in column G formatted as General. Cell G4 shows the difference between the axis endpoints divided by 3, which I’ll use as the tick spacing of the horizontal axis. You need to know the numeric values of any dates if you want to manually scale an axis, because XY