How to Create a Gantt Chart in Exploratory

A Gantt chart is an essential tool for visually representing project tasks and progress over time. By displaying tasks’ start dates, end dates, and assignees along a timeline, it enables at-a-glance understanding of overall project progress.

1. How to Install R Package

We’ll use a R package called timevis to create Gantt charts.

For details about the timevis package, please see here.

Select “Manage R Packages” from the project menu.

When the R Package Management dialog opens, select “Install New Package,” enter “timevis” and click the install button.

A confirmation dialog will appear, click the OK button.

2. Data to Use

We’ll use a sample project management dataset called “project_schedule”. The data can be downloaded from here.

This data is used for managing project task schedules, where each row represents one task and includes the following columns:

task: Task name (e.g., Requirements Definition, Basic Design, etc.)
start_date: Task start date
end_date: Task end date
progress: Task progress rate (%)
team: Responsible team (e.g., Planning Team, Development Team, etc.)

3. Creating a Gantt Chart

Click the + button on the right side of the report and select “Create Note.”

This will open the note window.

Since we need to write R script to visualize the Gantt chart, select “R Script” from the plus button inside the toolbar.

Copy and paste the following script into this R script:

# Load libraries
library(timevis)

# Data preparation (formatting data for timevis)
timeline_data <- project_schedule %>%
 mutate(
   content = task,
   start = start_date,
   end = end_date,
   group = team,
   # Progress bar style settings 
   style = paste0(
     "background-color: rgba(33, 150, 243, 0.3); ",
     "height: 30px; ",
     "border-radius: 5px; ",
     "border-left: 4px solid rgb(33, 150, 243);"
   )
 ) %>%
 select(content, start, end, group, style)

# Create Gantt chart
timevis(
 data = timeline_data,
 options = list(
   locale = "en",  # English date display
   orientation = "both",  # Show both groups and timeline
   stack = TRUE,  # Stack tasks
   showCurrentTime = FALSE,  # Hide current time line
   height = "500px",  # Specify height
   horizontalScroll = TRUE,  # Enable horizontal scroll
   verticalScroll = TRUE,  # Enable vertical scroll
   zoomKey = "ctrlKey",  # Zoom while pressing Ctrl key and scrolling
   start = min(project_schedule$start_date),  # Display start date
   end = max(project_schedule$end_date)  # Display end date
 ),
 groups = data.frame(
   id = unique(project_schedule$team),
   content = unique(project_schedule$team)
 )
)

It should look something like this.