Changing the look

Choose File › App settings…, then Light or Dark under Theme. This changes the whole window: the menus, the ribbon, the grid, the chart’s background and every dialog. It is yours, not the plan’s, so a plan someone sends you opens in the window you chose.

The plan’s theme sets the colours of its chart: the bars, milestones, the today line, the dependency lines, the weekend shading and the banner with the plan’s name. The window around it follows your light or dark setting above.

Under Theme, pick one of eleven from the list: Sunny Amber, Spring Lime, Bright Sky, Graphite, Excel Fresh, Ocean, Lavender, Rose, Mocha, Coral or High Contrast. A line beside the list says what each looks like, and the colour squares underneath show its colours.

Sunny Amber	Bright Sky
Ocean	Graphite

A bar you have coloured yourself keeps its own colour in every theme; the pictures above use a plan whose bars follow the theme.

To use your own colours, tick Custom. The squares start from the theme in the list, and you can click any of them to change it: the bars, progress, milestones, baselines, actuals, summary bars, dependency lines, critical path, the header behind the plan’s name, the today line, holidays and days off. Until you change one, picking another theme in the list starts you from that theme instead. Once you have changed a colour, your colours are kept: pick any theme to see the plan in it, or untick Custom, and tick Custom again whenever you want your own colours back.

Holidays is the one square with a Default: it puts the holiday colour back to the one worked out from the theme.

New plans start in Bright Sky. Each plan keeps its own theme, so two open plans can look different. A plan saved in one of the older themes opens in the nearest new one: Classic in Sunny Amber, Blue in Bright Sky, Dark in Graphite and Excel in Excel Fresh.

When you import a Gantt Excel workbook, its theme becomes the nearest one here: Classic becomes Sunny Amber, Blue becomes Bright Sky, Dark becomes Graphite and Excel becomes Excel Fresh. A workbook with Custom colours keeps them.

A milestone or a phase that is 100% complete is drawn in the progress colour, so you can see at a glance what is done.

Right-click the bar on the chart and pick a Bar colour and a Progress colour. Choose More colours… on either row for any colour at all, or Default to go back to the theme’s colour.

You can also pick colours in the task form, next to Bar colour and Progress colour.

The Oakfield plan uses this to give each phase its own colour, as in Gantt Excel: orange for design, green for groundworks, red for the structure and purple for the finishes. Its milestones are red diamonds.

Under Bar style, choose Flat, Rounded, Raised or Glossy. Each choice has a small preview beside it.

Under Project header, choose Banner (a solid band of colour, as in the pictures in this guide) or Rail (a plain strip with a thin coloured line).

Under Show beside each bar, pick from Add a column…. The task name is shown to begin with. You can add any column, for example the people, the % complete or the dates, and you can show several. They are written one after another, separated by a dot. Click × to stop showing one.

Under Baseline and actual bars, untick Show baseline bars to hide the thin strips above the bars, or Show actual bars to hide the strips below them. Both are ticked to begin with, and a new plan starts with whatever you chose last. Hiding a strip only hides it: the baseline and actual dates are still kept, still in their columns, and still in an export if you show those columns. The strips are hidden in Excel and PDF exports too.

In Settings › Appearance, click Task grid, then pick the colours for High, Normal and Low. Until you pick one, each follows your light or dark window.

Hold Ctrl and turn the mouse wheel, or use the slider in the bottom-right corner. The plan can be shown from 50% to 200%. Click the percentage to go back to 100%. View › Zoom in, Zoom out and Zoom to 100% do the same from the menu.

This changes only the size on screen. It doesn’t change the dates the chart shows. For that, use the Zoom buttons on the view row (see Working with the Gantt chart).

Go to Settings › General › Date format in the grid and choose from twelve formats, such as 07-Oct-26, 07/10/2026, 10/07/2026 or 2026-10-07. The dates in the grid and beside the bars follow this. The task form and the rest of the window keep the 07-Oct-26 style. The licence and update screens use the format of the plan you have open.

If the format you pick reads day and month the other way round from your Windows settings, a warning appears, so you don’t mix up 7 October and 10 July.

Tick Show times with dates to see the time as well, for example 07-Oct-26 08:00.

Settings › Appearance › Timeline › Column width sets how wide one column is at each zoom. Back to the defaults resets them.