Free Google Sheets Project Timeline Templates for Easy Planning

Project timelines can be a game-changer if you’ve struggled with deadlines, shifting priorities, or task overload. They break down complex projects into key milestones, set clear deadlines, and help you stay ahead of risks.

For a project timeline template, Google Sheets remains a go-to tool—familiar, affordable, and easy to customize. But finding the right template can be tricky. To simplify it, we’ve rounded up the best free Google Sheets project timeline templates to streamline your planning and keep projects on track.

What Makes a Good Google Sheets Project Timeline Template?

First, let’s quickly examine what differentiates a good project timeline template from a mediocre one. A good template has the following characteristics:

• Clear and concise layout: It’s well-organized with clear headings and columns, making it easy to read and understand
• Flexibility: It can be adapted to different project types and sizes, allowing for easy customization
• Task breakdown: It allows you to divide the project into smaller, manageable tasks 
• Milestone identification: You have options to mark important milestones and track project progress (even better if you can do this with visualizations)
• Timeline customization: It allows you to easily adjust the timeline scale (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly) to suit a project’s specific needs
• Version control: You can track changes to the timeline and ensure that everyone is working with the latest version

The right Google Sheets project timeline template can help you track even the most complex projects and deliver them on time without being lost in a sea of tasks, dependencies, and deadlines.

7 Great Google Sheets Project Timeline Templates

Now, let’s explore some Google Sheets templates for project timeline management that might fit your team perfectly. 

Project Timeline Template by Coefficient

The Project Timeline Template by Coefficient is a straightforward weekly project timeline template. It’s divided into four phases for each week of the month. By breaking down your project into weekly chunks, you can hold your team accountable for specific deliverables and milestones. 

It also has a ‘Days’ column where you can estimate how long a particular task would take. This helps you plan your team’s workload effectively and allocate resources accordingly. 

However, while it allows basic task scheduling and progress tracking, it doesn’t offer built-in features for visualizing and managing task dependencies. So, you may be unable to use it to create timelines for complex projects with multiple interdependencies. 

Project Schedule with Timeline Template by Coefficient

Another free template from Coefficient, the Project Schedule with Timeline Template, is ideal for teams seeking a dual approach to project tracking. This template allows you to monitor project status and visualize progress simultaneously using a combination of color-coded charts and timelines.

Any time you add or update a task in your project tracker (located in the bottom half of the template), the information is automatically reflected in the project timeline and chart. The chart visually represents task progress using color-coded boxes: green for completed tasks and red for ongoing tasks. The width of each box corresponds to the task’s duration.

Project Management Issue Log Template by Template.net

This template—the Project Management Issue Log Template from Template.net—is specifically designed for bug or issue tracking. First, create a master list of all your employees and a description of their designation and contact information.

Whenever a team member encounters an issue, they can document it in the project management issue log sheet. This sheet incorporates color-coded priority levels to indicate the issue’s severity and urgency. This visual cue aids in prioritizing tasks and allocating resources effectively. 

Project Timeline Roadmap Template by Template.net

Are you a project manager planning a long-term project? Maybe it’ll take you three months or more? Then, the Project Timeline Roadmap Template by Template.net is for you. This user-friendly template helps you create a clear and concise 3-month timeline for your project, guiding you smoothly from the planning stage through task assignment and execution.

If your project extends beyond three months, you can easily add another section to accommodate the extended timeline. However, it’s important to note that this template provides a high-level overview of your project roadmap rather than a detailed, granular breakdown of tasks and milestones.

Timeline Template by Template.net

The Timeline Template by Template.net is a no-frills project tracker that can be customized for any timeframe (daily, weekly, or monthly). You just need to divide your project into multiple phases. 

This template is designed to provide a high-level overview of your project’s timeline, focusing on the broader phases rather than individual milestones and tasks. While you won’t find granular features for task assignment or dependency tracking, this simplicity lets you focus clearly on the big picture.

Task Timeline Template by Template.net

Unlike the previous template that focused on the high-level view, this Task Timeline Template by Template.net offers a detailed and action-oriented approach to project management, focusing on the specific tasks that need to be done.

Here, you can break down your project into multiple tasks, assign them to people, and track their progress in a color-coded progress bar. Plus, it also has a ‘Notes’ column where you can add comments or mention dependencies.

But that’s not all. Every time you add a task to the task tracker and fill out the details, it’ll be automatically updated in the Task Timeline Sheet, where you can visualize your progress against a calendar.

Daily Timeline Template by Template.net

The final template on our list is a Daily Timeline Template from Template.net. As the name suggests, this template gives you a day-wise tracker to monitor your team’s tasks. While it’s great for teams, allowing you to visualize daily progress when following agile time-tracking and project management frameworks (like daily scrum), it’s even better for individual use.

Laying out your day’s tasks can help you allocate time efficiently and avoid last-minute crunches. Sharing your daily timeline can also foster collaboration and alignment with team goals if you’re part of a team. Just remember to use it as a tool for transparency and coordination, not as a means of micromanagement.

Limitations of Using Google Sheets for Project Timelines

While Google Sheets is a great jack-of-all-trades, it’s quite limiting in depth. It may not be ideal for complex projects or those requiring advanced project management methodologies. Here are some cons of using Google Sheets to manage your project timelines.

• Limited task management features: Lacks advanced task management features like subtasks, custom fields, and dependencies. This makes managing complex projects with interrelated tasks difficult
• Difficulty in tracking time and costs: Requires manual addition of columns to track time and costs but lacks built-in time management or cost estimation features, complicating budget monitoring
• Limited visualization options: Offers basic charting and formatting options, it may not be sufficient for creating visually appealing and informative timelines, especially for large-scale projects
• Real-time collaboration challenges: Becomes cumbersome for multiple users working on the same timeline simultaneously, especially if there are cross-team dependencies 
• Not mobile-friendly: Provides mobile access but isn’t optimized for mobile use, often requiring constant zooming

10 Alternative Project Timeline Templates

If you’re seeking specialized templates for comprehensive project management, ’s pre-built templates for project timeline management can be a good starting point. 

Built over ’s project management suite, they come with in-depth capabilities that can help you track and visualize your project’s timeline in various ways, from Kanban Boards and Calendars to Gantt Charts.

The Project Timeline Whiteboard Template

Let’s start with the Project Timeline Whiteboard Template. This template can be a very convenient option if you like the simplicity of moving sticky notes to rearrange tasks and modify deadlines or have a highly unpredictable project with changing timelines.

Plus, color-coded sticky notes are a great way to track task progress. 

Here’s how the template works:

• Horizontal axis: Represents the project’s stages or steps
• Vertical axis: Indicates the project’s timeline or duration

You can use color-coded blocks to visually represent the timing of specific activities and sticky notes in matching colors to highlight detailed tasks within each stage. Once you’ve finalized the tasks, you can double-click on a sticky note and click Task to convert that sticky note into a task. Super convenient, right?

The Gantt Project Timeline Template

The Gantt Project Timeline Template is for those looking for a template that allows you to visualize project progress and compare it against your original timeline.

The template offers weekly, monthly, and yearly views and even allows you to hide weekends from the chart, making it a great option for short-term and long-term projects.

The template includes pre-made Custom Fields like:

• A drop-down menu with options like ‘Initiate,’ ‘Plan,’ ‘Monitor,’ and ‘Management’ to denote the task phase
• An automatic progress bar showing the task completion percentage 
• A formula field to note the task duration (calculated based on start and due date)

This helps you visualize task progress against deadlines. To make things even more convenient, you can adjust the duration of a specific task by dragging it on the chart.

The Marketing Project Timeline Template

If you’re looking for a structured framework to plan, organize, and track marketing initiatives, may we suggest trying the Marketing Project Timeline Template? This template comes with three views: 

• A Timeline View for Quarterly Planning
• A Pipeline View to track project status
• A Marketing Leads Capacity view to track workloads

It also has Custom Fields for:

• Indicate the effort required to complete a task
• Estimate the budget needed to complete an activity
• Track the actual cost required for an activity

Plus, you can also calculate the budget difference using Formulas. 

The Fillable Timeline Template

The Fillable Timeline Template is a great starting point for those who want to hit the ground running. It provides a pre-structured framework, so all you have to do is add your tasks to get started. 

This template is divided into two sections: a timeline on the left and a task list on the right. To set a task’s start and end dates, drag and drop them onto the timeline. The template will automatically update the task’s phase and duration.

This is a great template for teams with a list of tasks but want to ‘fill out’ a timeline. Project managers can also ask their team to add all their tasks to and then use this template to plan their team’s workload. 

As this template comes with a Workload View, you can plan your team’s workload alongside the timeline. Other views include:

• A Gantt chart to visualize progress
• A Kanban View to group tasks by status
• A Master List to view all your tasks

This makes this the perfect template to manage your projects, workload, and timelines from a single place.

The Timeline Whiteboard Template 

The Timeline Whiteboard Template is a super user-friendly template that allows you to track your projects monthly. The template comes with two views:

• A monthly view to highlight monthly project progress and milestones
• A yearly view to highlight yearly project progress and milestones

This template’s simplicity makes it ideal for personal use, like planning courses, hobbies, or family projects, rather than complex, team-based ones. The visual nature of the whiteboard also makes this a kid-friendly template if you plan to work on a project with your children or plan out their education. 

The Creative Project Timeline Template

Looking for a fun and simple timeline template to keep track of your creative projects? The Creative Project Timeline Template is made for you. A simple whiteboard presentation, this template allows you to use fun shapes to plan your project timeline and actual trophy images to celebrate milestones.

This template does not have hard-and-fast rules or frameworks. You can add your templates—be it a month or a year—and your project statuses. As this is a whiteboard, you can add other shapes and connectors to break down larger tasks into smaller ones or add notes.

Basically, it can be as simple or as granular as you want it to be.

The Software Rollout Project Timeline Template 

Put simply, a software rollout plan is the plan that happens before you go to the actual software development process. Here, you create a full-circle plan for your software launch—from market research and prototyping to development and marketing. 

And here’s where the Software Rollout Project Timeline Template can help—ensuring you have all your cards in place before you get to the actual work.

This template comes with three sections (or views):

• The Rollout Plan View, which is a whiteboard where you can brainstorm your project plan
• The Rollout Deliverables View, which is a master list of all the tasks that go into your software launch
• The Rollout Process View, which is a Kanban Board to group your deliverables by status (or phase)

If you prefer, you can also create other views, such as a dashboard or Gantt Chart, to visualize the progress of your software rollout plan. 

The Project Roadmap Template

The Project Roadmap Template is for product development teams who plan new releases on a quarterly timeline. With this template, you can plan upcoming feature releases by quarter and plan out your budget, team workload, and priorities. This is a product manager’s one-stop shop to keep track of feature roadmaps.

The project roadmap template also comes with five different views for different use cases:

• List View: To organize and prioritize tasks in a linear list format
• Workload View: To monitor team capacity and workload distribution
• Calendar View: To visualize deadlines and milestones on a calendar
• Gantt View: To plan and track project timelines, milestones, and dependencies
• Board View: To visualize workflows and track statuses on a Kanban board

And if you’re an agile team, you can also use the Custom Fields to categorize your tasks by sprints and track progress with sprint points.

The Business Roadmap Template

While the previous roadmap template was specific to product development teams, the Business Roadmap Template can be used to map out the timeline of any business initiative.

A case in point is the ‘Business Category’ custom field, which you can use to mention which department owns a specific task. You can also filter the Timeline for each business category so teams can get an idea of only their responsibilities without being overwhelmed by all the tasks.

This template also comes with multiple views, including:

• Monthly Gantt Chart: To visualize and track project timelines every month
• Quarterly Overview: To get a bird’s-eye view of all initiatives in a quarter, regardless of department
• Strategic Goals View: To group tasks by their overarching goals for better alignment and prioritization

You can also create task dependencies and visualize them on the Gantt chart, which is a super helpful feature for cross-department projects with multiple interrelated tasks.

The Simple Gantt Template

Finally, we have the Simple Gantt Template, a useful tool for planning project timelines and proactively identifying and addressing dependencies by visualizing task relationships.

For example, if Task B is dependent on the completion of Task A, the Gantt chart will clearly show this relationship using a connector. So, if Task A is delayed, you’ll need to update your project timeline to account for the delay in both Tasks A and B. 

Simply map out the project’s tasks, subtasks, and dependencies in the Project Plan View. ATheProject Gantt View. will automatically update all your tasks 

As you mark a task or subtask as completed in the Project Plan View, your Gantt Chart will automatically track its progress. BThistemplate helps you visualize a project’s progress and dependencies in real time without any extra work from your side.

Stay in Control of Your Project Timelines with

A specialized tool is always better than a generic one. You get more features, and it’s easier to customize them to match your systems. 

Project management software, like , offers a range of features tailored to streamline project workflows, irrespective of your project management framework or system. Features like task management, Gantt charts, goal tracking, and more can help you plan, organize, and track your projects efficiently and collaboratively.

So, if you want to make project management effortless, sign up for for free and get started immediately.

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