What is the Gantt Chart used for?
While the gantt chart looks a bit like the calendar's grid view, they are really for different things, and the gantt chart is best at looking at the activities over the course of a project.
On the grid view, each row is a resource in the calendar, so you can have may activities associated with that one resource: this makes the grid view great when you're looking for gaps in your schedule.
Rows on the gantt chart, in contrast, each represent an event, so you,ll never have more than one thing happening in a row.
A few other things to note...
The gantt chart can show any range of dates (and range 2 weeks or longer) while the grid view can show any 2 week range, or events within a single day when it is set to show hours or minutes (the gantt view will not show hours, only days).
You can filter the gantt chart to show just items for a single resource or a single project.
The chart's default sort is by project, but you can also sort by date. Sort buttons are just above the column of event names.
When do items show up on the gantt chart?
When you first arrive at the gantt chart, it will show you all the events which match the active filters occurring in the two weeks starting from the focus date of the calendar. Once you're on the chart, you can select any range of dates you'd like using the default date ranges at the bottom of the screen, or the "custom" range button which let's you type in your own dates.
If some of the events on a project occur before the left hand side of the chart, we'll preface the project or phase name with "..."
Tips & Tricks
Shift-Drag to change duration. If you hold down the shift key when dragging the start or end of an event, you can change the duration of the event. (this works in other calendar views as well).
Showing just a single project on the gantt chart. You can type in part of the project's name on the filters tab to show just that project, or click the name of one of the active projects listed on the "More" tab. Click a project once again to de-select it.
Chained Items. Items with a little chain beside then are
tied together within the project so that changes to the dates of one linked item cascade through to change the dates of downstream items on the project.
Quickly jump to a project. You may jump to a project by shift-clicking on its name jn the list of active projects. Alternately, click on any event for that project and click the green arrow pointing to the project's name (this also works in other views of the calendar).
Use the filter "show only milestones" to include only events tagged as milestones. (The event detail layout contains a checkbox to tag an items as being a milestone or not. Events created from
process templates are automatically tagged as milestones.)
Printing. Printing the gantt chart is limited to what you can see on screen. If you need more sophisticated printing options we may be able to build something for you as a custom modification, so please
get in touch.
Adding fields to the Gantt Chart layout.
The fields on the left side of the gantt chart (the ones on a white background) are simply fields from the CalendarEvents table and you can add any calendar event fields here you'd like. You can also add fields from any of the TOs related to CalendarEvents:
CalendarEventsStaff
CalendarEventsProjects
CalendarEventsPhases
CalendarEventsContacts
Adding rows to the Gantt Chart layout.
You may want to increase the size of the gantt chart by showing more rows, or maybe you'd like to add a scroll bar to it. In this case you can adjust the number of rows that can be displayed at the beginning of the script "Load records into Gantt Chart" by changing the value of the variable $$sc_GanttRows.
