In last week’s post on project cost tracking, we happened to use an animated GIF of a OnePager Gantt chart to illustrate how project costs changed over time. Since then, several customers have reached out asking how to do the same thing.

These animated .gif files can be inserted into a SharePoint Image Web Part, PowerPoint documents, and other office documents, to be included in your reporting.

This week’s post will show you step-by-step instructions on how to animate your OnePager Gantt chart, like this:

I’ll start out in Excel with a very simple project plan:

From that Project plan, I’ll build a OnePager Gantt chart. This simple project report shows the schedule of all five tasks, plus a progress bar to track percent complete:

Now, go back into Excel and make a few changes to the project schedule. Specifically, I’ll update dates and durations, and note progress where it’s taken place:

In OnePager, go to Data > Add Snapshot to add a second snapshot to your Gantt chart:

In this case, we’ll set the second snapshot to be four weeks after the first, so that the Gantt chart is revised with new dates, durations, and progress like this:

I’m going to add a few more snapshots the same way, but won’t bore you with repeating the steps here. When I’m finished updating, I have a OnePager Gantt chart with six snapshots. If you want to see these snapshots, you can go to OnePager’s View tab, and use the Previous and Next buttons to see how your project has changed:

To create an animated GIF that can be shared with non-OnePager users, I’m going to export each of my snapshots to an image file. Do this under File > Save As. I recommend the .PNG image format.

Once I have an image exported from each snapshot, I want to stitch them together into an animated GIF. There are tons of third-party tools that can do this for you, including several free online services like GIFMaker.me that do a pretty good job. ScreenToGif is great for more complex animations.

Regardless of which tool you end up using, you should end up with something like this: