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Stop Fighting with PowerPoint and Excel: A Better Way to Build Gantt Charts

Love em or hate them I needed a better Way to quickly Build Gantt Charts

As a delivery manager, I’ve spent far too many hours wrestling with PowerPoint boxes and Excel trying to create simple, readable Gantt charts. Every time dates slipped or dependencies moved, I knew I was about to lose hours to formatting fixes. That frustration led me to build something for myself — and now I’m sharing it with the community:

👉 Get it from my website at https://gantt.rnwolf.net.

or install it locally Simple Web Gantt Viewer code at Github**

It’s a free, open-source tool that generates clear, Gantt charts… without the formatting pain.

Why I Built This

Most Gantt tools feel over-engineered or lock your data behind a subscription. I wanted something that was:

  • Lightweight: All the logic runs right in your browser; there’s no server, no backend processing.
  • Privacy-friendly: Your plans stay on your local browser — nothing gets shared unless you choose to.
  • Baseline tasks: As real plans always evolve, toggle a baseline to see how things have changed.

The goal wasn’t to replace enterprise project management systems, but to create a practical, everyday tool to manually and safely create pretty charts for communicating timelines without endless admin overhead.

Why Gantt Charts Get a Bad Reputation

It’s true: many agile practitioners criticize Gantt charts as "too waterfall." That critique often comes from bad experiences where Gantts were used to drive unrealistic promises.

Here’s the real issue:

  • ❌ Wishful estimates instead of realistic ones
  • ❌ Plans made for the team instead of with the team who will actually deliver
  • ❌ Treating the chart as “the truth” rather than a living conversation

Like any planning tool, a Gantt is only as good as the collaboration that goes into it.

I like to remind my teams of a classic line often attributed to Eisenhower:

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

The value of a Gantt chart isn’t that it predicts the future perfectly — it’s that it forces the conversations needed to align dependencies, spot risks, and agree on realistic delivery approaches.

There are also techniques such as Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) that incorporate buffers, to deal with uncertainty, that make Gantt charts way more useful.

Why Not Excel or PowerPoint?

If you’ve ever maintained a serious program plan in Excel or PowerPoint, you know the pain:

  • Excel: Great for numbers, but fragile and clunky for timelines. Every small change can break the formatting.
  • PowerPoint: Fine for static slides, but terrible for ongoing updates. Every shift means hours of reformatting boxes and arrows.
  • Both: Static, siloed, and not reusable for the next project.

This is wasted effort that adds no value to delivery.

What Simple Web Gantt Viewer Brings

With this tool, you get a smoother experience:

  • Easy to use GUI to drag tasks into shape -> Define tasks, create dependencies and add additional task meta-data.
  • Zoom in/out and all about -> The chart just renders, no endless fiddling with shapes. Snap a screen shot and add it to your communications.
  • Download and upload project plan as a simple json text file -> Download/Upload simple to understand files that define tasks and links.

The Real Payoff

When you stop spending hours reformatting PowerPoint slides, you free up time to focus on what actually matters: co-creating realistic plans with your team and keeping stakeholders aligned as things change.

Because plans will change — and when they do, your chart should adjust quickly without collapsing under its own formatting. That’s why a lightweight, browser-based viewer, with text based data that can ver version controlled like this makes such a difference to the planning process.

Final Thoughts

Whether you work in agile, hybrid, or traditional delivery, visual timelines matter. They aren’t about predicting the future — they’re about creating a shared understanding of what the future could look like and how work that future hangs together.

That’s why I built Simple Web Gantt Viewer — for myself first, and now for anyone who’s sick of building brittle charts in Excel or PowerPoint.

👉 Give it a try locally: Simple Web Gantt Viewer or get it from my website at https://gantt.rnwolf.net.