Excel help - visualising schedule of talks

[Russinating]

I've got a schedule of talks happening on a day - 251 talks, 83 unique, in 49 different places.

The columns in excel are talk name, start time, end time and room number.

What I want to is visualise this in a Gantt/calendar-style chart whereby the x-axis is time, the y-axis is room number, and then the talks span the period of time with the talk name as their label. There'll obviously be 49 rows, one for each room.

Solution may even not be in Excel but I've no idea how you would import that info into a calendar say.

Help!

 

[wonko]

I can't think of any great way to do it in Excel.
One idea that might work is to use a stacked bar chart, where the first part of the 'bar' was the time from the start of the overall event to the start of the talk (set to be chart background colour so it doesn't show) and the second stacked part of the bar would then be the duration of the talk.
You'd need extra columns with formulas to calculate the offset from the event start and talk duration. With a bit of mucking about with chart axes you'd have a stacked bar for each talk (so 251 of them, not the 49 you want) but can be grouped/sorted by room and start time.
Any good?

 

[Miganto]

Pretty much what Wonko has said is how i've done it before too, there are examples of it on youtube that'll explain it in more detail too (it's what i had to use 2 years ago when i did it! ).

 

[ZombieFan]

Don't know if you've already solved this, but you can import from Excel into MS Project. It should pretty much accept the data in the format you've got it. Project will then display it as a Gantt chart.