Centralized Project Tracker

While working on a recent project I have to come up with a way to schedule and maintain tasks and timelines. Very first chart that came to mind was Gantt Chart. 

A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, named after its popularizer, Henry Gantt, who designed such a chart around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationships between activities and the current schedule status.

As we all do regarding any project management activity, I tried to implement it in excel first. But there's no default option to create Gantt chart. With some calculations and lots of conditional formatting I was able to create one but refrained from using it because of two reasons:-

1.  It's not a centralized solution where anyone from team can lookup status of the project. Every time there's some change in schedule you have to update the tracker and then share it with everyone, who might in turn share it with someone else without keeping everyone in loop and in no time there are 10 different versions of your tracker all indicating different timelines.
2. If someone messes with a calculation some where, you need to debug all calculations which resulted in your broken tracker.

To overcome this issues, I came up with a simple Centralized Project Tracker in Tableau. Once published there's only single source of information on project timelines which can be accessed by all the team members. Data is refreshed at a single source and you don't have to worry about sending it to multiple people. And yes, it's a breeze to create a Gantt chart in Tableau than in Excel.