I’ve been fiddling around in Excel today, so that I can display a timeline of various activities in a chart. (I think this counts as a Gantt chart, although there are no dependency arrows between the bars like you would see in MS Project.) I got the basic instructions from the help file, but there were a few extra steps that aren’t immediately obvious, so I’m documenting it here for my future reference; hopefully someone else will find it useful too. I’m using Excel 2007; the process will be similar for older versions of Excel, but I don’t know about other spreadsheet applications (e.g. OpenOffice).