If you need to create a simple Gantt chart, see Creating a Gantt chart or Gantt chart with progress. To add events to your Gantt chart, see Progress Gantt chart with events. This tip will help you to extend those charts by a vertical line that shows the current date.

Gantt chart is a pervasive project management tool intended to reveal task management problems. Besides creating tasks on the Gantt chart, you can enrich it with additional information like project milestones, presentation dates, and similar events.

Gantt chart is a horizontal bar chart that is often used in project management applications.

To show progress, highlight current or any date, or demonstrate the difference between the target value and the actual one, you can add bullets to the chart, horizontal or vertical lines:

Vertical lines are usually added to the chart to highlight the current date, a critical date, or a deadline. There are many ways to add a vertical line to the existing chart. Errors bars are the easiest way to add a vertical line to a scatter plot. See how to add a vertical line to a line or bar chart or a horizontal line to a scatter plot, line, or column chart:

Some chart elements are hard to find for customization, or they are not visible at all. For example, added or updated data series may not be visible due to chart settings: located in an invisible data range, displayed with invisible markers, with disabled fill color, or because of the background image:

It is simple as ABC to add one or multiple trendlines in Excel. A bewildering task is to choose the trendline type that best corresponds to the data series and, if needed, format data to create correct trends, forecasts, etc. Excel adds trendlines with the default formatting and values, such as the default value Period = 2 for the Moving Average.

A trend line (or trendline, also known as a line of best fit) is a straight or curved line on a chart that shows a general pattern or the general direction of the data. The trend line displays the approximated values obtained using some mathematical function. The choice of function for constructing a trend line is usually determined by the nature of the data.

Periodical processes like the volume of support service calls often have critical zones that indicate a severe problem that needs to be investigated and mitigated. This tip shows how to reveal and emphasize those critical zones for analysis.

Every Microsoft document uses a Theme - a combination of coordinated colors, fonts, and effects that visually convey a certain tone. Using Themes is an easy way to specify the colors, fonts, and a variety of graphic effects in the document. You can apply a Theme or any of the Theme elements: Colors, Fonts, Effects.