so in this video i'm going to show you how to create a gantt chart let's start by talking a little bit about the interface in this tab called gantt tools you're going to have all of the items that you're going to use in creating the scan chart specifically creating tasks and subtasks indenting and outdating and i'll get into the more advanced features a little bit later moving down below you're going to have everything in columns and then everything in the columns will be graphically displayed on the right hand side so let's get started by creating a task and we'll create product launch also corrections in here for you and product launch is the project that we're going to be working on so create a subtask under product launch or another task you just simply click task and we can say there's going to be planning pressing enter will help you create a task even quicker we'll say there's going to be some product issues maybe sales and marketing now to create a subtask under each one of these items we're going to go up and hit subtask or pressing insert on the keyboard and let's say set a team and set a budget so what we're doing is creating summary tasks like you see in planning and then the items that are associated with that summary task so that's simply how to get started pressing enter and insert will help you create tasks and subtasks or deliverables and work packages so what i'm going to do is grab a template so as you can see in this example everything's defined and it's represented on the right hand side so expand and you can see the different columns in the gantt chart i can also in columns and determine what i want to be seen and what i want to be hidden for relevance purposes now the first thing you want to do when you get started with a gantt chart is talk about the project calendar so what i'm going to do actually even before project calendar i'll go to project information what project information allows you to do is create your start date so as you're adding the durations to these tasks it automatically calculate the end date and vice versa if you know of a release date and you want to calculate when you need to begin the project now going into project calendar you can determine your calendar a default calendar is a five day 40 hour work week but again that depends on what your industry is and that's all customizable not only can you get into project calendars as a whole you can also get into resource calendars and we'll be covering resources a little bit later so the way to work within a gantt chart is start to estimate the duration of these items so for instance i can estimate that's going to take five days this is going to take four days maybe this is going to take three days now you'll notice some of these are darker and that's because they're summary tasks they're going to be everything below the summary task is going to roll up so you can't determine the duration of a summary task because it's determined by its children or subtasks also you want to estimate the duration as opposed to creating a start end date if you determine that you want the start date on the 26th what that is actually doing is creating a constraint a constraint is just that it tells the project when a certain task can be started can be completed and we'll get into constraint strengths a little bit later you can also get into dependencies and everything that you do on the left side of the gantt chart you can also do on the right side so if i want to expand this and i want to create a predecessor on number three it will create a dependency so what this is saying to the project manager is that setup team has to be completed before we start define launch plan component and once again everything that we do on the left can be done on the right for drag and drop so i can then drag another drag and drop another dependency i can also drag and drop a constraint i can even drag and drop my durations and my completion percentages so when adding in resources again we'll explain expand this a little bit further and we can put in resources manually by typing them in or if i go to project resources i have a resource pool already in here and again you can type that in manually you can import a resource pool you can pull it from an outlook outlook address book or active directory and there's a whole resource management side of a gantt chart where you can get in the rates per resource as you can see here as i mentioned before you can get into resource calendars and you can get into effort driven tasks as well and to get into this level of detail all you have to do is go to project information excuse me you actually go to task information and this is associated with the task that's highlighted so again you can get into constraint types you can get into effort driven tasks creating milestones lead times lag times predecessors along with the different predecessor types and of course assigning resources from your resource pool or manually and finally you can also customize these gantt charts so i can actually add resources and task name so visually it's a little bit easier to indicate what you're working on if you prefer to work on the right hand side you can definitely change the color scheme the fill colors the patterns as well you can also show bass lines so you can analyze what you actually planned versus what you actually what actually happened but this is how you create a gantt chart starting from the simple adding tasks and subtasks adding resource resources and duration but then getting into constraints and dependencies allow you to actually track the project process