Presentations
Gantt chart slides
A Gantt on a slide is a communication object, not a plan. It exists to show an audience which things overlap and roughly when, which means the useful version has eight bars and readable labels, not two hundred rows exported from a scheduling tool.
Four grids already sized for a real horizon
A quarterly roadmap across Q1 to Q4 holding up to eight bars. A phase rollup across five months holding six. A sprint plan across six sprints holding ten. A swim lane roadmap across five quarters, from Q1 2026 to Q1 2027, holding twelve. Those caps are set per layout because a bar chart with twelve rows in the space designed for six is unreadable rather than dense.
A bar is a start column and an end column
There are no dates. Each task names the column it starts in and the column it ends in, inclusive, so a task that starts and ends in the same column occupies one cell. Setting a start later than the end is not possible, because the end follows the start up automatically. That coarse model is the point: it makes the slide say this happens in Q2 and Q3 rather than inviting an argument about the fourteenth.
Groups do the colouring
Each task takes an optional group name, and tasks sharing a group share a colour drawn from the theme. Type Engineering on three tasks and they become one visual workstream. The field offers your existing group names as you type so you do not end up with Engineering and engineering as two different colours. Leave it empty and every bar takes the same colour, which is right for a simple phase plan.
Column labels are yours to rename
Q1 to Q4 is a default, not a constraint. The inspector opens a list of the column headings and each is editable, so the same grid becomes Week 1 to Week 5, Stage 1 to Stage 4, or the actual month names. The number of columns is fixed by the layout, so choose the layout by how many periods you need rather than planning to add one later.
There are no dependency arrows
Tasks carry a name, a start, an end, an optional group and an optional description. There is no link between two tasks and nothing draws an arrow from the end of one bar to the start of another. If a dependency is the point of the slide, write it into the description or say it in the flow of the talk. For a genuine dependency graph, a flowchart is the component that has edges.
How it works, in three steps
Step 1
Pick the grid by its horizon
Quarters, months or sprints. The column count comes with the layout, so start from the right one.
Step 2
Add tasks with a start and an end column
The counter in the inspector shows how many you have against the cap for that layout.
Step 3
Group the related ones
Typing the same group name on several tasks gives them a shared colour and turns a list of bars into workstreams.
The full walkthrough with screenshots is in the guide Add charts, maps and diagrams to slides.
Limits worth knowing
- No dependencies. Tasks cannot be linked and no arrows are drawn between bars.
- No real dates. A bar is placed by column index, so the smallest unit is one column.
- Task caps are set per layout: six, eight, ten or twelve depending on which you choose.
- The column count is fixed by the layout. You can rename the headings but not add a sixth column to a five column grid.
See it on a finished piece
Questions people ask
Can I show that one task depends on another?
Not as a drawn link. Tasks have no relationships to each other. Put the dependency in the task description, or use a flowchart, which does have connections.
Can I enter real dates?
No. A task occupies whole columns, and the columns are whatever you name them. That coarseness is deliberate for a presentation.
How many tasks fit?
Between six and twelve depending on the layout, and the inspector shows the count against the cap as you add. Fewer bars read better on a projector.
How do the colours get chosen?
By group. Tasks sharing a group name share a colour taken from the theme, so a theme swap recolours the whole chart consistently.
Make your own presentation
The button opens the generator with this use case already described. Change the wording to match yours, generate, then edit anything you like.
Create a presentation with OneCraftRelated pages
Timeline slides
Time on a slide has more than one honest shape. A run of milestones wants a rail. A set of phases with detail under each wants columns. A history with unequal gaps wants a vertical list. Twenty layouts cover those cases, and choosing badly is what makes a timeline unreadable.
A presentation researched from web sources
Before it plans a deck, the writer can look things up. One search, and optionally a full read of a couple of the pages it found. This page covers what that changes, when it does not bother, and the thing you should not expect from it.
How to structure a presentation
Structure is the order of the slides and nothing else. Get it right and average writing survives; get it wrong and good writing does not. Five patterns cover most business decks, and each one is written here as a sequence of slide kinds you can build directly.
More finished work of this kind is on the presentation examples hub.