Forum Discussion
A colored column representing holidays
I am looking for ideas as to how to create a transparent, colored visual column within an MS gantt chart representing a date range that correlates with the Christmas holidays. Basically, just a vertical bar crossing all tasks that visually indicates the holiday date range (say 12/22/25- 01/02/26) so that as you scroll through all your tasks, that bar remains constant in the gantt chart. I can do a single date bar using Status Date, but have not found a way to perform a similar function for a date range. Any ideas or tricks?
Woode,
Are the Christmas holidays non-working? If yes, then create a custom calendar with those days as non-working and use that calendar as the Project calendar.
However, if you simply want to identify that time span, working or not, there are a couple of options.
- Use Project's drawing feature to create vertical lines depicting the start date (12/22/25) and end date (01/02/26). You'll have to play with it to get the presentation you want. Unfortunately, the drawing tools have some issues (i.e. attempting to color the area between the two vertical lines sits on top and blocks out all Gantt features, "send to back" doesn't work).
- Take a look at this Dale Howard's solution offered in his response to a similar question. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5608561/how-do-i-add-school-holidays-shading-to-the-calend
John
1 Reply
Woode,
Are the Christmas holidays non-working? If yes, then create a custom calendar with those days as non-working and use that calendar as the Project calendar.
However, if you simply want to identify that time span, working or not, there are a couple of options.
- Use Project's drawing feature to create vertical lines depicting the start date (12/22/25) and end date (01/02/26). You'll have to play with it to get the presentation you want. Unfortunately, the drawing tools have some issues (i.e. attempting to color the area between the two vertical lines sits on top and blocks out all Gantt features, "send to back" doesn't work).
- Take a look at this Dale Howard's solution offered in his response to a similar question. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5608561/how-do-i-add-school-holidays-shading-to-the-calend
John