I'm looking for a simple tool to visually communicate the delivery schedule of Epics (parent stories). What has worked in the past is a simple diagram like the following:

(The columns titles indicate the bi-weekly sprint. "1507-2" just means 2nd half of July 2015, it's a shorthand used forever to communicate our entire company, to avoid ambiguity of saying "Sprint 17")

What I'm looking for is essentially a Gantt chart, but just a friendly version.

Right now we manually create these in Visio or PowerPoint, but it's a pain. I've looked at Project, and it's overkill with it's version of Gantt chart.

Ideally, I'd like to just take an excel spreadsheet to generate this for me from columns of "User story", "Start" and "End". Even if it didn't take it from an excel spreadsheet and I had to enter all the epics in manually, it would be better than manually creating all those dang boxes and moving around.

Does anything exist to address what I'm looking for?

Ideally, I'd like to use an Excel spreadsheet to generate the following for me from columns of "User Story", "Start", and "End". Even if it didn't take it from the spreadsheet and I had to enter all the epics in manually, it would be better than manually creating all those dang boxes and moving them around.

In the diagram above, the columns titles indicate the bi-weekly sprint. "1507-2" just means 2nd half of July 2015, it's a shorthand used forever to communicate our entire company, to avoid ambiguity of saying "Sprint 17".

What I'm looking for is essentially a Gantt chart, but just a friendly version. How can I generate this type of chart from Excel?