How to Make a Gantt Chart in Google Slides (Free Template Included)

A Gantt chart is an essential project management tool, as its project planning, scheduling, and tracking features help manage the entire project life cycle. For this reason, there are many Gantt chart software alternatives, ranging from easy-to-use spreadsheet software such as Google Sheets or Excel to specialized project management software like ProjectManager or Microsoft Project.

In this blog, we’ll explore the process, pros, cons and benefits of making a Gantt chart in Google Slides and other similar alternatives to help you decide which is the best Gantt chart software for your projects.

Why Make a Gantt Chart in Google Slides?

Google Slides is a tool designed for making presentations that allows collaboration with team members online. These two attributes make it an ideal choice for making Gantt charts and sharing them with project stakeholders in project meetings such as a project proposal meeting, the project kickoff meeting or project status report meetings. All of these are important for getting the project approved and keeping stakeholders informed on progress.

This free Gantt chart template for Google Slides is ready to utilize for any project management presentation. Simply open it in Google Slides, make a copy and begin editing with your own project information. It will help you make a Gantt chart in Google Slides in minutes.

Gantt chart Google Slides template by ProjectManager

Why ProjectManager Is Better Than a Gantt Chart Template for Google Slides

However, while Google Slides is an ideal tool for making easy-to-understand Gantt charts for project presentations, they are a mere visual representation of a Gantt chart that lacks most of the project planning, scheduling and tracking features that robust project management software like ProjectManager offers.

ProjectManager is award-winning project management software that offers advanced Gantt chart software features such as resource planning, cost tracking, critical path analysis, task dependency mapping and many other features that project management teams need. In addition, ProjectManager offers a suite of project management tools such as kanban boards, project dashboards, timesheets and project management reports. Get started with ProjectManager for free today.

ProjectManager's Gantt chart view is much more powerful than a Google Slides Gantt chart — ProjectManager’s Gantt chart has advanced planning, scheduling and tracking features. Learn more

Google Slides Gantt Chart: Pros & Cons

As we’ve briefly discussed above, a Google Slides Gantt chart has pros and cons, which are important to know when deciding which Gantt chart software is best for your organization. Let’s explore these advantages and disadvantages in more detail.

Pros of Making a Gantt Chart in Google Slides

Google Slides is a tool that’s easy to use and understand for most people, including project team members, clients and stakeholders.
Because Google Slides was exclusively created for presentations, a Google Slides Gantt chart is a good choice when reporting on project progress to stakeholders such as sponsors, clients or executives, who oversee the project from a high-level view and don’t necessarily want to review all the detailed information than a project management software Gantt chart has, but rather an overview of the project.
Because Google Slides is a free tool, these files can be easily shared with anyone, as opposed to expensive project management software like Microsoft Project, which requires people to have a subscription to view or edit files. This facilitates team collaboration and project reporting.

Cons of Making a Gantt Chart in Google Slides

Google Slides isn’t a project management tool and lacks most of the features that Gantt chart software offers, such as linking dependent tasks, identifying critical path activities, allocating resources or cost tracking.
A Google Slides Gantt chart requires much more manual editing than Gantt charts made with project management software, which makes the process of making and adjusting a project schedule very time-consuming.
Google Slides Gantt charts can’t store project data or integrate with any other project management tools, unlike ProjectManager’s Gantt chart, which syncs with dashboards, timesheets, task lists and even external apps.

ProjectManager’s Gantt View Is Better Than a Google Slides Gantt Chart

ProjectManager’s Gantt chart is equipped with project planning, scheduling and tracking features that make it a robust project management tool for managing projects from start to finish. Also, as previously mentioned, ProjectManager is more than just a Gantt chart software. It offers a fully-featured suite of project management tools and features besides Gantt charts. Now, let’s learn more about these key features.

Advanced Gantt Chart Features

ProjectManager’s Gantt chart view allows project managers to make project schedules, allocate resources such as people and materials, track costs and monitor the project timeline, budget and progress with real-time dashboards. On top of this, it helps identify and link four different types of task dependencies, find the critical path of a project schedule and mark milestones in a visual project timeline.

Multiple Project Management Tools

As previously mentioned, ProjectManager’s Gantt charts automatically sync with other project management tools that let project managers zoom into various aspects of their projects. For example, they can manage workflows with kanban boards, track labor costs with timesheets, monitor project progress at a glance with real-time dashboards or generate a variety of project reports in minutes.

Team Collaboration Features

ProjectManager also outperforms Google Slides in terms of online team collaboration. ProjectManager allows team members to visualize changes to the Gantt chart in real time, share files at the task level and use unlimited file storage for managing project documentation and instant messaging features.

How to Make a Gantt Chart in Google Slides

Let’s go through each step required to make a Gantt chart in Google Slides. The first thing to know is that a Gantt chart has two main elements. A project task list is on the left and a project timeline or stacked bar chart is on the right. We’ll create both of these elements using tables and bars.

1. Insert and Edit a Table for the Project Timeline Calendar

First click “Insert” at the top menu as shown in the image and then select a table of 2 rows and 20 columns, which is the maximum number of columns that can be created at once. When that table appears, then proceed to manually add more columns by right-clicking the bottom row and selecting “Insert column right” from the drop-down menu to make a total of 30 or 31 columns depending on the month of the year you’d like to create.

Inserting a table to make a Gantt chart in Google Slides

Once you have a table with two rows and the desired number of columns, now merge all the columns in the first row by selecting all cells, right-clicking them and then selecting “Merge cells” from the drop-down menu.

how to merge cells for a Gantt chart in Google Slides

This row will be used to name the month of the year and then you can edit the fill color and adjust the font size.

Project timeline heading on Google Slides Gantt chart

2. Insert and Edit a Table for the Project Task List

Now, insert a table with two columns and five rows and place it underneath the table previously created in step one.

The left side column will be used to list project tasks, and the column on the right will be used as the space where task bars will be placed. To do that, expand the size of the right-hand side column as shown below.

Partially completed Google Slides Gantt chart

As you can see, there’s a name in the upper left corner of the table, indicating who will be responsible for executing the tasks. Or alternatively, this can be omitted to show the tasks for a team, instead of an individual.

3. Add Bars to Represent Tasks in the Google Slides Gantt Chart

Now, it’s time to insert bars that will represent the duration of each of the tasks listed in the Google Slides Gantt chart. To do so, simply click on “Insert” at the top menu and select a shape from the menu. For this Google Slides Gantt chart example, we’ll use a rounded rectangle shape.

Let’s assume “Task #1” is scheduled to start on the 3rd of January and will finish on the 8th. Therefore the task bar is placed as follows. Make sure the ends of the task bars are aligned with the right day on the calendar timeline table.

Adding task bars to a Gantt chart in Google Slides

Congratulations, you’ve created a Gantt chart in Google Slides! Now simply continue to insert more bars to represent the due dates and durations of all the tasks of your project. You may copy this slide repeatedly to show the tasks of all your project team members or schedule projects of any length.

Finalized Google Slides Gantt chart template by ProjectManager

Free Project Management Templates for Google Sheets and Docs

This Gantt chart for Google Slides can be very helpful, especially with project meetings and presentations. However, even though Gantt charts are a very versatile tool, they’re not the only project management chart that you’ll need when managing projects. For that reason, we’ve created dozens of project management templates for Google Sheets, Docs and Slides. Here are some of those related templates.

Gantt Chart Template for Google Docs

This Gantt chart template for Google Docs is ideal for making Gantt charts that can be easily attached to project management documents such as project proposals, project charters, project management plans and many others, making it a very useful project planning template.

Kanban Board Template for Google Sheets

Kanban boards help project managers manage tasks and monitor their team’s progress by dividing workflows and processes into stages of completion. On top of that, this free kanban board template for Google Sheets can be easily shared with team members, who can use it to visualize their workload.

Project Budget Template for Google Sheets

Google Slides Gantt charts can be used to make a project schedule, but they don’t help with project budgeting. Luckily, this free project budget template for Google Sheets can be used to list the resources that are required to execute project tasks such as labor, materials and equipment to then estimate their costs and add them together to make a project budget.