How to export a Gantt chart that fits on one page

PDF, PNG or Excel?

Choose PDF for print or an attachment, PNG for a slide or document, and a spreadsheet when the recipient needs to edit dates.

Be careful with the spreadsheet row. Most Gantt tools export the task list to Excel, not the bars. Smartsheet's export help says it directly: Excel does not support a Gantt chart format, so exporting a Gantt chart to Excel exports only the task list it is based on. If the person needs to see bars in Excel, they have to build them there, which the guide to building spreadsheet bars walks through.

How much fits per page?

On landscape A4 or Letter, roughly 30 rows and two to three months of daily columns with weekends hidden, or about six months of weekly ones. A3 gives you about half as much again in both directions. Those figures come from page sizes and a few readability assumptions, so you can redo the sums for your own paper.

The assumptions: 10 mm margins, a task-name column 60 mm wide, a 15 mm date header, rows at least 6 mm tall so names stay readable at about 9 point, and columns at least 4 mm for a day, 8 mm for a week and 15 mm for a month.

Read the table as a budget. A four-month plan at day level needs about 85 working-day columns with weekends hidden, which is A3 territory, or A4 if you switch to weeks. A plan with 60 rows will not fit on one A4 or Letter page at a readable height until you collapse some of it.

As a check against a real export: a sample plan of 21 rows and 48 working days, with weekends hidden, came out on a single A4 landscape page with room to spare when exported with a fit-to-width setting. That matches the table: 48 days is under the 54-day budget, and 21 rows is under 29.

How do you fit more?

Shorten the date range and reduce detail before changing paper size or scaling. Work through these steps in order, with fit to page last.

1. Cut the date range. Print the next quarter, not the whole year. If the reader needs the whole year, print it as two or three pages by phase. TeamGantt's own PDF help suggests exactly this: page one for January to June, page two for July to December.
2. Coarsen the timescale. Switch day columns to weeks, or weeks to months. Microsoft's guidance for printing a year in Project is to change the timescale to show quarters over months.
3. Collapse to summary rows. Show phases, not every task, for anyone above the team. Project's print help suggests collapsing all tasks so only summary tasks show.
4. Hide columns you do not need. Start, finish, duration and owner columns eat timeline width. Keep the task name.
5. Hide weekends. If your tool offers it, this removes two columns in every seven at day level.
6. Go landscape, then go bigger. Landscape first, A3 or tabloid second.
7. Only now, fit to page. Fit to one page wide, and let the height run to a second page rather than squeezing rows.

If the chart still does not fit after step six, the problem is not the export. The plan has more detail than one page can carry, and the honest fix is two pages or a summary.

Which PDF layout fits?

Start with fit to page width for print or email. Choose tiled pages for a wall chart or one long page for screen reading; most tools offer versions of these three layouts.

• Fit to page width. The whole timeline goes across one page and the zoom is reduced to make it fit. Rows that do not fit run onto the next page. Best for printing and email.
• Tiled pages. The chart keeps its zoom and is cut into a grid of pages. Best for a wall chart you tape together, poor for anything else.
• One long page. A single oversized page at the current zoom. Suited to screen reading, not printing.

Fit to width is the one to start with. It is what Smartsheet calls Fit to Width in its PDF options, scaling the data to the width of one page with the length allowed to run onto further pages, and what Excel does when you set Scale to Fit to one page wide and height to automatic.

Fitting both width and height to one page can make text too small. Excel's scaling help warns that the printout may be difficult to read because Excel shrinks the data to fit, and suggests checking the percentage in the Scale box. If that number is low, go back to the steps above instead of printing it.

Before sending, open the PDF and check the last page. A single orphaned row on page two usually means the date header plus one more row tipped it over; shave a row or tighten the margins.

How should you export PNGs?

Export a PNG of only what the slide needs to show, then place it without stretching. A slide is read from across a room, so it carries less than a printed page: about 12 to 15 rows and one to three months is a sensible ceiling on a 16:9 slide.

Three things keep the image readable:

• Export at high resolution. Use the largest size your tool offers; an image shrunk onto a slide stays sharp, one stretched to fill it does not.
• Crop to the window that matters. If the talk is about the build phase, show the build phase. A full-year image where one bar is the point helps nobody.
• Hide unnecessary grid columns. Every column on the left takes width from the bars.

Smartsheet has a dedicated Export Gantt to Image (PNG) option that lets you export the whole sheet or selected rows. Microsoft suggests a different route for Project: create a timeline of key tasks and milestones and drop that into the slide. If you are building the slide itself, the guide to building timeline slides compares drawing the bars with inserting a chart.

What else needs a label?

A title, an "as of" date, a key if colours mean something, and page numbers if there is more than one page. The date is the one people forget, and it is the one that matters: a printed plan is out of date the day after it is printed, and readers need to know which day that was.

• Title: the project name and what the page shows, such as "Client portal, build phase".
• As-of date: "Plan as of 3 March". Put it in the header, footer or file name.
• Key: what the colours, diamonds and markers mean, if they mean anything.
• Page numbers: "2 of 3", so a loose page can be put back in order.

Some tools add these for you and some do not. Microsoft Project's print help has Header, Footer and Legend tabs under Page Setup, and notes that some views include a legend of the bar types on each printed page. If your tool prints no legend or date, add them where the image lands: a caption under the picture in a report, or a line of text on the slide. Do not leave the reader guessing what purple means.

Which tools offer one-page exports?

Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, TeamGantt and Excel offer ways to fit exports to a page. Their help pages describe different scaling controls and limits:

Two details stand out. Smartsheet's printing troubleshooting gives the fixes for the 100-page error as selecting specific rows, scaling to fit fewer pages and changing the timeline display to a larger unit of time, which is the same order as the steps above. And TeamGantt's PDF help is the opposite of most tools: it fits everything on one page by default, so the risk there is a page too dense to read rather than too many pages. Its own advice is to print long projects in phases by date range.

If you build charts in a spreadsheet, a ready editable spreadsheet schedule already uses landscape-friendly column widths. A free browser tool such as Ganttile is another option: its PDF export offers fit to page width, tiled pages or one long page on A4, A3 or Letter in either orientation, its PNG renders the whole chart, normally at twice screen resolution, and its Excel export is a task table with the outline levels kept, not bars. It prints no legend, so add a key in your report if the colours carry meaning.

Gantt chart printing questions

Why does my Gantt chart print on so many pages?

A tiled Gantt chart export keeps the screen zoom and divides the timeline across pages. Shorten the date range, switch to a coarser timescale such as weeks, and use fit to width on landscape paper.

Can Excel print a Gantt chart on one page?

Yes. On the Page Layout tab, set Scale to Fit to 1 page wide and the height to 1 page. Microsoft warns the result can be hard to read because Excel shrinks the data, so set the height to Automatic if the text gets too small.

Should I send a Gantt chart as a PDF or a PNG?

Send a PDF when the chart will be printed or attached on its own, because text stays sharp. Use a PNG when the chart goes inside a slide or a document, where it needs to behave like a picture you can crop and resize.

What should you check last?

Decide who reads the page and what they need from it. Cut the range, coarsen the scale, collapse to summaries, hide what you will not discuss, and only then press fit to page. Add a title and an as-of date, and check the last page before it goes out.