Export SharePoint Tasks to PowerPoint (free, no Power Automate)
Rolling this out to more teams?
Let our team set up project tracking in SharePoint
We design your project sites, lists, and Power Automate workflows, then train your team so project tracking actually sticks.
Every project manager hits the same pattern: the work lives in a SharePoint list (or Microsoft Planner, or Excel), but the steering committee wants a PowerPoint. The traditional answers are slow:
- Re-key the tasks into PowerPoint by hand every month.
- Build a fragile Power Automate flow that screenshots a page.
- Pay for Project for the Web, then still export to PowerPoint manually.
- Buy a Gantt add-in like Smartsheet or GanttPRO that lives outside your tenant.
This guide covers the free, in-tenant way: the open-source Smart Gantt Chart SPFx web part manages your plan in a SharePoint list it creates (import an existing list via Excel/CSV) and exports a four-slide project report in one click.
What's in the deck
- Cover slide — project name, owner, report date.
- Timeline slide — high-resolution PNG of the full Gantt chart with milestones and the today-line.
- Milestones slide — upcoming and overdue milestones with target dates.
- Status summary slide — tasks by status (Not Started / In Progress / Complete / Blocked) and overall % complete.
The deck is a real .pptx — you can open it in PowerPoint, edit any slide, swap the cover image, and send it on.
Works with any source, not just SharePoint lists
Most teams don't start a project in a SharePoint list. Smart Gantt Chart's import covers the usual suspects so you don't have to:
- Microsoft Planner — direct import via Microsoft Graph.
- Microsoft Project / Project for the Web — export to Excel, paste in.
- Asana, Monday, Jira, Smartsheet — Excel/CSV export, paste in.
- Plain Excel or CSV — for spreadsheet-tracked projects.
Why not Power Automate?
You can build a flow that triggers on a schedule, queries a list, and writes a PowerPoint via the Office Scripts or third-party PPTX connectors. It works, but:
- You have to design the slide layout in code.
- There's no Gantt rendering — you'd have to draw bars from rectangles.
- Premium connectors mean per-user licensing.
- Every layout change is a flow edit.
Smart Gantt Chart does the rendering and the export in the browser, in-tenant, for free. See also how to create a Gantt chart in SharePoint 365.
Five-step recap
- Install the Smart Gantt Chart web part in your App Catalog.
- Add it to the project site page.
- Create a project and import your tasks from Planner or Excel/CSV (export an existing list to Excel first).
- Adjust the timeline view if needed — zoom, group by phase, color bars by health.
- Click Export → PowerPoint.
When to still use Project for the Web or Smartsheet
- You manage a portfolio of 50+ projects with cross-project resource levelling.
- You need scheduled, automated status reports landing in a distribution list every Monday.
- You need a fully-hosted SaaS with a vendor SLA, not an in-tenant SPFx web part.
For everything else — a single project, an ad-hoc steering committee deck, a Planner board that's outgrown Planner — the free web part is enough.
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Rolling this out to more teams?
Let our team set up project tracking in SharePoint
We design your project sites, lists, and Power Automate workflows, then train your team so project tracking actually sticks.
About the author
Sean Regan
SharePoint & Microsoft 365 consultant with 20+ years of hands-on experience building SPFx web parts, migration tooling and tenant-grade automation. Maintainer of the open-source SharePoint Smart Solutions suite.