A Gantt chart is a type of Bar chart which is commonly used in project management, and is one of the most popular and useful ways of showing activities such as tasks or events displayed against time. It was developed by Henry Gantt in the 1910s for tracking project schedules.
Gantt charts show the start and finish dates of various tasks/elements in a project. These elements comprise the work breakdown structure of the project. A Gantt chart can also be used for showing things in use over time, for example, the duration of a machine's use, or how long it took for people to hit a milestone and how that was distributed over time.
In the following recipe, we will create a Gantt chart by connecting to the Data for Box plot & Gantt chart Excel file we downloaded earlier. This Excel workbook has a sheet named Gantt Chart data, which contains sample data of various phases in a project-management process.
This is a small dataset, which has a Start date for each Task. Let us use this data and follow the steps mentioned in the following recipe to quickly create a Gantt chart, which will show us the duration of each Task.
- Let us first create a new worksheet and rename it to
Gantt chart. - We will then press Ctrl + D on your keyboard and connect to the Excel file named Data for Box plot & Gantt chart file, which is saved in our
Documents|My Tableau Repository |Datasources|Tableau Cookbookdata folder. - Next, we will select the Gantt Chart data by double-clicking on it.
- And then go ahead with the Live option to connect to this data.
- Next, we will multi-select the Start and Tasks field from the Dimensions pane and the Duration from the Measures pane by doing a Ctrl + Select.
- Next, let us click on the Show Me! button and select the Gantt view. Refer to the highlighted section in the following image:
- Once we click on the highlighted chart, we will see the view shown in the following image:
- Currently, the view is aggregated to show Year of the Start field. However, the data consists of various events on various days of a particular year. We will click on the dropdown of the green pill of Year(Start) in the Rows shelf and select the option Exact Date. Refer to the following image:
- Once we select the Exact Date option, we will see the following view:
- For our last step, let us drag the Tasks field from the Dimensions pane and put it in the Color shelf. Refer to the following image:
