Excel Timeline Template: Project Timeline, Milestones & Gantt Chart

Project Timeline & Milestone Maker turns a simple list into a finished timeline chart in Excel. Add each milestone or event with its date and category on the Plan tab and it appears on the Timeline, alternating above and below the axis at three heights so labels do not overlap. Each category has its own colour, a dashed line marks today, and the axis labels switch between weeks, months, quarters and years to fit the period you show.

Zoom by typing a window start and end on Settings: close in on one busy month, or pull out to a multi-year programme. Leave the window blank and it fits itself to your dates. The Timeline tab prints on one landscape page with a table of the milestones and events shown, so it is ready for a status report or a slide.

Tasks carry a start date and an end date or a duration in workdays. Weekends and the holidays you list are skipped, and a task that depends on an earlier item starts the next working day after it finishes, so when something slips the work after it moves too. The Gantt chart shows every task as a bar shaded by % complete, late work in red, milestones as diamonds and today's column highlighted, across 60 columns of days, weeks, months or quarters.

The Dashboard shows overall progress weighted by workdays, milestones hit, late items with days overdue, items due soon, progress by category, the next milestones and events, and open work by owner. Status is worked out from a status date you can set, so reports stay consistent.

It works for project timelines, product launches, marketing calendars, event plans and history timelines: rename the six categories as phases, teams, workstreams or eras. Capacity covers 100 items, with the first 24 in the window plotted on the chart. Calculated cells are locked and sheet protection has no password. Sample data from a fictional app launch is included. Built for Microsoft Excel 2016 or later (desktop or Excel for the web) and contains no macros.