What is a Gantt Chart?
A Gantt chart is the horizontal bar chart of the schedule: each activity is a bar placed on a calendar, its length showing duration, with links showing dependencies and (usually) a line or diamond set for progress and milestones. It's the most widely recognized picture of a project on Earth.
Its strength is instant readability — anyone can see what happens when. Its weakness is that it shows results of scheduling logic, not the logic itself; for that you go to the network diagram and critical path. Modern tools blend the two by highlighting the critical path directly on the Gantt bars.
Worked example
On a kitchen-remodel schedule, the Gantt shows demolition (week 1), electrical and plumbing overlapping (weeks 2–3), cabinets waiting on both, then countertops after cabinets. The homeowner doesn't know what "finish-to-start dependency" means — but they can read the bars and see why countertops can't come early.