Build a Gantt chart in Power BI with the new native visual

Project timelines in Power BI have always meant installing a custom visual. The October 2026 update changes that: a Gantt chart is now a core visual, in preview, with duration bars, progress, milestones, grouping, extra task-list columns and a zoomable axis — built in, nothing to import.

Turn the preview on

1. In Power BI Desktop, go to File > Options and settings > Options > Preview features and enable the Gantt visual.
2. Restart Power BI Desktop — the option takes effect after the restart.
3. The visual appears in the Visualizations pane, marked (Preview).

The fields that drive it

Pause animation

1. 1Task label
2. 2Start and End dates
3. 3Progress measure
4. 4Groups and columns

The only required field is the task label — one row per task. Everything else is additive:

• Start and End draw the duration bar. Both accept measures, which is how you control date aggregation at category levels.
• A milestone is a Start with a blank End. That rule is also the trick for milestone flags: write an End measure that returns blank when your data marks the row as a milestone, and the visual draws a diamond instead of a bar.
• Columns beside the task list show details like owner, status or duration. To show subtotals at category levels, a column needs to be a measure or an aggregation. Links can display as icons instead of text.
• Extra tooltip fields add context without adding visible columns.

Progress and grouping

Add a measure that returns each row's percentage complete and the bar shows it. Two styles are built in: a translucent white overlay on the bar, or a colour fill inside bordered bars — and the fill's share of the bar's height is configurable in the Format pane.

Group tasks with up to three category levels. Colouring then works top-down: set one colour under Rows > Color and the visual cascades it — solid task bars and milestones, and progressively lighter category row backgrounds (70%, 80%, 90% transparency by level). For per-category or per-task colours, switch the level to More granular; conditional formatting is available too, and every element can opt out of the cascade.

The axis, weekends and zoom

• Auto-scale picks years, months or days from the range, the visual's size and the zoom level — and never goes finer than days, though bars can show partial days when your dates carry times.
• Turning auto-scale off gives a fixed two-level axis — months over years, or even the same unit twice with different formats, such as weekday names over day numbers.
• Shade days marks chosen weekdays — weekends, typically — as shaded columns.
• The zoom slider lets readers focus on a window of the timeline and return to the full range without leaving the visual.

Limits to plan around

• 1,000 rows is the ceiling. A portfolio-scale schedule needs filtering or a different approach.
• No task dependencies, no connector lines between tasks, and no critical path.
• No baselines — plan-versus-actual comparisons aren't in the preview.
• Measure display formatting may not carry into tooltips and columns; set Data format on the Format pane's General tab as the workaround.
• With More granular colours, static colours can skip some category levels or tasks that appear in several categories — Microsoft points to conditional formatting instead.

If those gaps matter to your schedule — dependencies, critical path, baselines — a custom Gantt visual remains the route for now; the native visual covers the plain-timeline cases that used to require one.

Sources

• Gantt visual in Power BI (preview) — Microsoft Learn
• Power BI October 2026 Feature Summary — Microsoft Fabric Community blog
• Visualizations overview in Power BI — Microsoft Learn