Planning your project is easier with excel based gantt charts.

Using a proprietary project planning package means that you are locked in to the developers way of thinking.

With a well crafted excel based solution, you are able to embed your way of thinking into the tool.  If you want to use effort based scheduling, calculate project costs, or determine actual's in the way you want then excel is your answer.

For more on excel based project scheduling
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Gantt Chart Reason#1: Finally you can see what you are doing!
Looking at a column of start and finish dates for tasks, is the primary alternative to using a Gantt Chart.    Each row of your plan requires you to think about the dates, and position those dates in the context of preceding and dependent tasks.  This thought process, attempting to visualize your dates in your head, takes valuable thinking time, and more importantly can only be performed effectively on one or two tasks at once. A Ga...

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Gantt Chart Reason#1: More Control

Using excel gives you more control over the gantt chart creation process.  It provides you with the freedom to control key planning variables as you see fit.  For example if you would like to convert 8 hours, or 7.5 hours into one day, it is straight forward to do with a simple formula.  If you would rather plan in minutes, you can do this too.  Whilst structured planning tools such as MS Project do have a place, experience suggests that for an experience...

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Contrary to the beliefs of the main gantt chart software packages, every project and every plan has its own special requirements.

Some project plans may require you to measure and manage effort for billing purposes.  Other plans may need minute based planning.  There are so many different requirements of project planning that it is difficult to build these into a single gantt chart tool.

This is where MS Excel has some very substantial advantages in preparing gantt charts.  The major, and o...

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The features discussed below are only available in Chart Gantt Ultimate, to be released in August 2010

 We set ourselves the ambitious task of re-creating standard functionality in major project planning software tools.  One of the main challenges in building an excel based gantt chart is the use of WBS (Work Breakdown Structure).  There are a number of issues with the use of WBS in excel.

Whilst we have seen other excel based tools that attempt to offer WBS, they do this via a combination of m...
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We are very excited by the launch of Chart Gantt 2.0.  We set ourselves the ambitious task of adding significant functionality to Chart Gantt without the need for macro's.  The issue with macro driven Excel based Gantt Charts is that they are inherently unpredictable.

By steering clear of Macro's we have created a stable excel platform that just works.  This enables users now to view as much as 3 years of chart in the one screen.  This is a minor breakthrough in the Gantt Chart world, and took...
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