As with the previous case, I’m going to describe a quick and simple method. This method also takes weekends into account as non-working days. We ended the last post with what you see alongside (left).So, let’s begin by adding the date for day 1 into cell F1. I'm typing “22/2” to represent 22nd February). It’s not readable in the small width of the cell, so we’ll go to the Format Cells window (you can use Ctrl-1 to get there quickly) and select text orientation as 90 degrees. Then, to get the date format that we want, we’ll stay in the Format Cells window and specify a custom number format of “dd-mmm (ddd)”. If the height of row 1 doesn’t automatically increase for you, just do it manually. You should have a result like this:
Now, let’s set G2 as =F1+1 and copy the formatting from F1. This gives us the correct result for G2, but it’s not a sequence that we can ask Excel to follow because we’ll get weekends included, so we should set the formula for G2 to =IF(WEEKDAY(F1)<>6,F1+1,F1+3). In other words, if the previous day is not a Friday, just add 1 to the date; if it is Friday, add three to the date. We can copy and paste G2 across the remainder of the row:
So, with very little effort, we have a Gantt chart with day numbers and dates.
In one further posting I’ll describe how to add groups of tasks and how to summarise them.
