Simple horizontal bar chart please!

[Pegedaal]

Hi All,
I’ve watched several videos on making horizontal bar charts, and they all work fine.
BUT, what I’d like to do is keep it really simple and housed within the sheet structure - NOT floating diagrams and other whizz-bangs.

So, how can I ‘draw’ or fill one cell to represent each month horizontally?
e.g. From May to December is 8 months inclusive. How can I get Calc to fill in 8 cells horizontally?

What I am trying to create is a dynamic sheet with over 100 horizontal timelines showing a small number of specific key events so that my colleagues can see what is about to happen over the next 8-12 months.

e.g.
Project 1: May —>June [concept]---->Aug [design}---->Nov [product]---->Dec [end]
Project 2: May —>Aug [concept]—>Oct [design]—>Dec [product]—>Feb [end]

As background, the REPT function works graphically well with BLOCK shapes, but doesn’t allow me to add text at key stages, or add different work stages end-to-end, as per the IF / AND functions.

So that is why I think just having a shaded cell with text in it would be simple, clean and shareable.
Am I mad?

All thoughts welcome, many thanks.
cheers
P

[mikekaganski]

Sparklines?

Or rather, data bars in conditional formatting.

Anyway, it is all guessing, without a sample data as a spreadsheet with a mockup of the wanted result.

[Lupp]

The question apparently concerns a small section of what is covered by project management software.
The paradoxical problem here is that the question concerns such a tiny part of the scope of this software class, and therefore the use of a professional solution can hardly be recommended.
A roughly sketched example of an amateurish solution by spreadsheet, without any chart at all, is attached.The projects are designated with lower case letters, the project states with upper case.
The overview sheet requires LibreOffice V 4.4 or higher to work properly.
ask91154projectStateoverview.ods (20.0 KB)

[EarnestAl]

Sounds like a Gantt chart, see Extensions » Extensions