How to create a Gantt Chart using excel

1. Start by creating a data range in Excel that lists tasks, start date, and duration.

2. Select the data range that you created that you want to make a Gantt chart for.

3. On the top navigation bar, select Insert on the menu ribbon.

4. In the Charts group, select the 2D Bar group, and click on the Stacked Bar option. The Stacked Bar is the closest option to a Gantt chart in Excel.

5. Next, you’ll need to format the stacked bar chart to appear more like a Gantt chart.

6. Click the first data series, or the Start Date part of the bar.

7. Click on the Format tab and select Shape, then No Fill.

8. Reverse the task order so that the Gantt chart starts with the first task. Hold the Control key and select the Vertical Axis, or the Task axis.

9. Select Format Axis. Under the Axis Position part of the window, check the box for Categories in Reverse Order.

10. Add a chart title by double clicking on the text box titled Chart Title at the top of the chart.

11. Format the axis title and color by double clicking on either axis. A popup window will open on the right side of the screen for you to edit the colors and lines of the axis.

12. To add elements to your chart (like axis title, date labels, gridlines, and legends), click the chart area and on the Chart Design tab at the top of the navigation bar. Select Add Chart Element, located on the far left side of the page.

13. To quickly change the layout of your Gantt chart, navigate back to the Chart Design tab and click on the Quick Layout button.

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How to Remove Empty Lines from a Word Document

Manually removing extra blank lines from a Microsoft Word document is tedious. Luckily, a feature built into Word can remove all empty lines at once. Here’s how to do it.

How Blank Lines Work in Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word adds a hidden tag (called a “paragraph tag”) to the end of each line whenever you hit Enter. You can see these tags in your document by clicking the paragraph icon (which looks like a backward “P” with two lines) in the “Home” tab of Word.

Using “Find and Replace” in Word, you can replace those double paragraph tags with a single tag. That removes the extra empty lines from your document.

How to Delete Extra Blank Lines in a Word Document

To start removing empty lines, open your document with Microsoft Word. Click “Home” in the menu and then select “Replace” on the right of the screen.

The “Find and Replace” window will open. Click the “Find What” box and type this:

^p^p

Each “^p” is a special code that stands for the paragraph tag. We’re going to replace instances of two-paragraph tags in a row with a single paragraph tag. In the “Replace With” box, type this:

^p

Then click “Replace All” at the bottom of the window.

After you click, all the blank lines will be removed from your document. When you see the confirmation pop-up, click “OK.”

If you still see any blank lines, that’s because there were more than two consecutive blank lines in place. In this case, click “Replace All” in the “Find and Replace” window again until all the extra lines are removed (or you can experiment with the number of “^p” codes that you find and replace until your needs are met).

When you’re all done, close the “Find and Replace” window. If you ever get annoyed with horizontal lines automatically appearing in Word when you type certain characters, you can replace those, too.

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