Plan on the Gantt chart

The Gantt chart is where schedule problems become visible: a dependency you forgot creates a hanger, a Christmas-week deadline shows the whole team booked off, the critical path makes it obvious which task slipping a day costs you a week on the project end. List views show you what; the Gantt shows you when, and most schedule-related arguments resolve in two minutes once everyone is looking at the same timeline.

Read the chart

• Bars are tasks, positioned by start and due date and colored by status.
• Arrows are dependencies between tasks, so you can trace what is waiting on what.
• Diamonds are milestones, rendered as zero-duration markers on their date.
• Zoom runs from day-level detail out to a whole-year overview.
• Expand subtasks switches between a compact top-level view and the full task hierarchy with summary bars.

Reschedule by dragging

1. Open a project and select the Gantt tab in the Work section.

2. Drag a bar left or right to move the task, or drag its edge to change its duration. The task’s dates update as soon as you release.

3. Drag any empty area of the chart to pan around the timeline without hunting for scrollbars.

Focus the view

• Assignee filter: show only one person’s bars to review an individual’s schedule.
• Critical path: highlight the chain of tasks that directly determines the project end date. Anything on the critical path that slips, slips the project.
• Baseline: overlay a saved snapshot of the planned schedule as grey ghost bars to see drift at a glance. See Capture and compare baselines.

Tip

Turn on the critical path before a replanning session. Effort spent compressing tasks that are not on the critical path does not move the end date; the highlight keeps the discussion on the tasks that do.

Best practices

1. Zoom out to year first. Most planning conversations start with “where are we going to land?” — a question the year view answers in five seconds. Zoom in only when discussing a specific week or sprint. PMs who default to the day view miss the big-picture drift.
2. Turn on the critical path before any replanning session. Compressing tasks not on the critical path doesn’t move the end date; the team will spend effort on the wrong tasks without the highlight. Five seconds to enable, saves an hour of misdirected work.
3. Capture a baseline at the moment the plan stabilizes. As soon as the dates feel right, take a baseline. The grey ghost bars become the reference for every change that follows, and answer “have we slipped?” with a visible answer instead of “kind of.”
4. Use the Auto-Schedule button when changes pile up. Manual drag is best for one-or-two-task adjustments; once you’ve moved a dozen, Auto-Schedule respects dependencies and lag and propagates the changes in one pass. Review the result before committing — it’s not a black box.
5. Set the working calendar before planning. Dates respect the org-wide working calendar (default Mon-Fri); if your team works Sun-Thu or includes US holidays, configure that first or the Gantt schedules people onto days they’re actually off. See Configure working calendars.

Troubleshooting / common pitfalls

• A task isn’t visible on the chart. A bar needs both a start date and a due date. Open the task and set them; it appears immediately. The other views (list, kanban, calendar, burndown) work without dates, but Gantt requires them.
• The critical path looks wrong / shorter than I expected. Two causes: (a) dependencies aren’t wired correctly (an implicit dependency in your head isn’t in the graph; add it explicitly); (b) the chart respects only the dependency graph and dates, not resource conflicts. If two critical-path tasks share an assignee, they don’t auto-stack — that’s a resource conflict the resource leveler addresses, not the Gantt.
• Dragging a bar broke a downstream dependency. The Gantt shows the new conflict (the dependency arrow turns red) but does NOT auto-cascade dates. This is deliberate — the team decides how to resolve. The two clean fixes: drag the downstream task forward to honor the dependency, or shorten the predecessor.
• The baseline overlay isn’t showing. Either no baseline has been captured (use the baseline button to take one now), or the baseline toggle is off. Multiple baselines can coexist — pick the one to compare against from the baseline selector.
• “Hanger” tasks (no dependencies in or out, mid-project). Usually means an implicit dependency was missed when the plan was built. The Gantt is the best surface for spotting these because the bar sits at an unexpected date. Add the dependency in the task edit view.

How this combines with other features

• Gantt + Dependencies + Baseline. The trio that makes schedule problems visible: dependencies make the structure clear, baselines pin the original plan, and the Gantt is the surface where you actually see drift. Capture the baseline immediately after wiring dependencies; every change after that is visible at a glance. See Link task dependencies and Capture and compare baselines.
• Gantt + Working calendar. Dates respect the org’s working calendar. If you change the working week (e.g., add a holiday), the Gantt re-flows tasks around the new non-working days automatically. See Configure working calendars.
• Gantt + AI Assistant. Ask the in-app AI assistant “what’s on the critical path of <project>?” or “what’s the longest dependency chain?” The assistant cites the tasks and renders the answer next to the chart. Available on every plan. See Chat with Onplana AI.
• Gantt + Sprints. A sprint is a date-bounded slice of the project. The Gantt shows the sprint’s tasks against the project timeline so you see whether the sprint commitment fits the project’s overall flow. See Plan a sprint.

Coming from another tool

Tool	Mapping
Microsoft Project	Gantt chart ≈ Gantt chart; arrows are FS/SS/FF/SF same as MS Project; critical path is computed the same way
Asana Timeline	Asana Timeline ≈ Gantt; Asana doesn’t natively show critical path
Jira Advanced Roadmaps	Roadmap timeline ≈ Gantt; dependencies render similarly; Jira’s “auto-scheduling” is closer to Onplana’s Auto-Schedule
ClickUp Gantt	Direct mapping; critical path toggle is similar
Smartsheet Gantt	Sheets ≈ list view; Gantt view is rendered from the same data, same dependency conventions

FAQs

Why don’t some tasks appear on the chart? A bar needs dates. Tasks without a start or due date cannot be placed on a timeline; give them dates and they appear.

Can I create dependencies from the Gantt? Dependencies are created from the task’s edit view, where you choose the link type and lag precisely. The Gantt renders them as arrows once they exist.

Does dragging a bar move its dependent tasks too? No. Dragging changes that one task’s dates. The dependency arrows make any new conflicts visible immediately, and you decide how to resolve them rather than having the chart cascade changes for you.

Why is the Gantt tab missing on my project? Gantt is a Pro+ feature. Free and Starter plans get list, kanban, calendar, and burndown — all powerful, but not the timeline. See Compare plans and upgrade.

Can I export the Gantt as a PDF or image? Yes. The Reports tab can render a Gantt-shaped snapshot suitable for stakeholder updates. The browser print dialog also produces a clean PDF of the current zoom level.

How does Auto-Schedule decide what to move? Auto-Schedule reads the dependency graph (with link types and lag) and the working calendar, then propagates earliest-start times forward from the project’s start date. It does NOT consider resource availability — that’s the resource leveler’s job.

Why is my critical path empty? You don’t have any dependencies wired yet. The critical path is the longest dependency chain from the project’s start to the project’s end; without dependencies, no chain exists. Wire dependencies and the path appears.

Related

• Link task dependencies — wire FS/SS/FF/SF arrows the Gantt renders
• Capture and compare baselines — the grey ghost-bar overlay for drift detection
• Plan team capacity — the resource view that complements the Gantt’s date view