Someone asks for “just a picture of the timeline” and you reach for the screenshot key. It is the fastest thing you can do, and it is almost always the wrong one — a cropped, soft-edged image at whatever resolution your monitor happened to be, with half a legend and a browser scrollbar down the side.
PNG is genuinely the right format most of the time. It is just worth thirty seconds to get a good one. Here is what actually matters.
When PNG Is the Right Answer — and When It Isn't
Three formats cover essentially every way a Gantt chart leaves your screen, and picking the wrong one is the most common reason an export looks bad.
| Where it's going | Use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Slack, email, a Confluence or Notion page | PNG | Renders inline everywhere, no plugin, no download step |
| A printed pack, a poster, a PDF report | SVG | Vector — stays sharp at any size, including A3 and beyond |
| A slide you'll present or hand over | PPTX | Arrives as an editable slide, not a picture pasted on one |
The rule of thumb: PNG for anything read on a screen at roughly the size you exported it. The moment someone might scale it up — print, projector, a full-bleed slide — you want SVG or PPTX instead. A PNG blown up 200% is the single most recognisable sign that a chart was screenshotted rather than exported.
The Four Things That Make a PNG Look Cheap
Every bad timeline image in every status pack fails in one of the same four ways.
- Resolution below the display density. Most laptops and every phone render at 2× or 3×. An image captured at 1× is being upscaled before anyone even opens it, which is where the fuzzy text comes from. Export at 2× the size you intend to display, and it will look sharp on every screen it lands on.
- Cropping that loses the key. A screenshot captures the viewport, not the chart. Anything scrolled out of view — usually the legend or the last two months of the timeline — is silently missing, and the reader has no way to know.
- Transparent backgrounds. A PNG with no background looks fine on a white page and unreadable the moment someone drops it on a dark slide or views Slack in dark mode. Export on an explicit background unless you have a specific reason not to.
- Too many rows. Forty activities that read fine on a 27-inch monitor become an illegible grey stripe in a Slack preview. If the picture is for other people, group or filter it down first — see the getting started guide for grouping.
Thirty Seconds Before You Export
A clean export starts with a clean chart, and the checks are the same regardless of which tool you use:
- Shorten the title. It is the first thing read and often the only thing read.
- Collapse detail your audience doesn't need. A steering committee wants phases; the delivery team wants activities. They are not the same picture.
- Check the legend survives.Colour-coding that isn't explained is decoration, and colour alone excludes anyone who can't distinguish your palette — keep the labels.
- Put a date on it.A timeline with no “as at” date will be forwarded for months and quietly believed. This is the failure mode behind most “wait, I thought that shipped” conversations — more on that in how project plans actually slip.
Doing It in Strategy Gantt
Open the export panel, choose PNG, and you get a full-chart image — every row, the legend, and the timeline axis, regardless of what was scrolled into view. The same panel offers SVG for print and PPTX for a real PowerPoint slide. All three are on the free plan, no card required.
The part that matters more than the file format: because the chart is generated from your data rather than drawn by hand, re-exporting after a date changes takes one click. The reason most timeline images are out of date is not that people don't care — it is that rebuilding the picture cost twenty minutes last time.
The Short Version
Use PNG for screens, SVG for print, PPTX for decks. Export at 2× the display size, keep the legend, stamp the date, and never crop the timeline to fit the screenshot. It is the difference between a picture that answers the question and one that starts three more.