Report and Dashboard View of Planned vs Actual progress Task

I have searched the community for some solutions for what I am trying to achieve…and there were lots of information that seemed close to what I am trying to do.  Many links that were shared for other blogs, articles, etc.,  are no longer active.  So I am hoping someone from the community can help me put it together.

We would like to create a simple view of the timeline in bi-weekly buckets for the rest of this year and into next year that includes the count of tasks to be completed with the planned vs actuals dates, percent of the project complete.  I’d like to turn this into a graph, which I saw some good examples of in the community, but not quite sure how to put it together.

To get started, I have created some helper columns

• Copied and locked the Start and End dates as baselines for reference. These baseline start and end dates I think should be used for the comparison to Actual dates.
• Added Actual Start and End Date columns
• Added 2 columns to calculate the variance between my planned start date & actual start date and planned end date & actual end date.  

I think the best approach is to set up a separate sheet with the biweekly reporting dates in a column and then count the tasks from my main project sheet for the baseline dates and actual dates to use for the graphing, but wanted to check with the community for any experience in this type of reporting and what are some of the best practices.

Thanks!

Ilene