PapaGantt - The Big Daddy of XL Gantt Charts

You just found the most powerful and easiest to use free, Excel based Gantt chart available.

NOTE! Version 2 now available with improved international support and new features. It looks a bit different and uses its own ribbon (as shown above) instead of buttons on the spreadsheet (as shown in the video).

This is a project I've resisted for many years. It felt a bit like re-inventing the wheel. There are a lot of free XL templates for Gantt Charts. And there are many good professional project management tools for sale. MS Project isn't bad and it's not expensive. So why create another?

The short answer is, there is a huge need for better project management tools than the freebies and the professional tools are tougher to learn and use than most people will put up with. I know. I’ve had to learn and use several.

The basic flaw with freebies is they ask us to enter dates. That’s NOT why we use Gantt Charts. Gantt Charts should tell US due dates, not the other way around. Gantt Charts should also ripple changes throughout the project for us. So if a task finishes early, what does that do to our completion date? Or if the deadline is pushed up, how must we respond? The odd thing about the XL freebies is, XL is perfect for calculating dates. Why not use XL to figure that out FOR us?

That’s the strength of the professional project management tools. They respond to all kinds of factors to project due dates, resource requirements, budget impacts, and more, but geeze, they can get complicated and demand a lot of data. In successfully managing several multi-million dollar projects as well as many smaller projects, I’ve learned those multi-million dollar projects need the best tools we can get but for smaller projects, they are totally over kill. Smaller projects typically use a handfull of people, last less than a year, and have deadlines that can move. And those projects typically are not run by PMI certified Project Managers. For those projects, PapaGantt is perfect.

PapaGantt is easy to use; asks for very little data; figures the dates out for us; and looks great. It is NOT MS Project. But for smaller projects, it’s better. At least that’s my opinion. And if you are not 100% delighted with this freebie, return it for triple your money back guaranteed. No questions asked.

Here’s how to get yours: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mv3vsjt26fhclao/PapaGantt.pdf?dl=0