A free Gantt chart template for Excel that knows how many people you have

Most Gantt templates are a grid you colour in by hand. This one works out the dates for you and then tells you the thing the others leave out: the days your plan quietly assumes more people than you actually employ.

Download the template (.xlsx)

No email, no signup. Works in Excel and Google Sheets.

What it does on its own

• Type a task, how many days it takes, and which task IDs must finish first. The start dates work themselves out and the bars draw themselves.
• Weekends are skipped and shaded. Set WorkDaysPerWeek to 7 if you work straight through.
• Underneath the chart, a daily resource load panel turns red on any day you need more of a trade than you have.
• Type a date over a Start cell and tick the Pin column to nail a task in place; everything else still calculates around it.

What it does not do

It draws the plan you describe. It will not reshuffle the work to fit your crew — no spreadsheet formula can, because that problem is NP-hard and needs a solver. That is what the free resource leveling and critical path scheduler is for: upload this same file and it hands it back with the dates rearranged, the red gone, and a straight answer on what your real headcount costs you in days.

The columns

• Days — duration in working days.
• Predecessors — task IDs, comma separated. 12 means finish-to-start. 12FS+3 adds three days of lag, 7SS starts with task 7, 4FF-2 finishes two days before task 4 does.
• Resource and Crew/day — who does it and how many of them, matched against the resources sheet.

Limits: 60 tasks and 95 days in the template. List a task below the tasks it depends on — the Check column tells you when you haven't.