Gantt Chart
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. If you don't have project records in your file, you likely don't need the gantt chart.
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 see more than one thing happening in a row of the gantt chart.
A few other things to note...
Can I delete the Gantt Chart view if I don't need it?
Absolutely. The gantt chart is just a tab on the calendar: enter layout mode, double click the tab control and delete the gantt tab. Just be sure to do that on the "Calendar - no Side Bar" layout also.
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 lets 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
Adding fields to the Gantt Chart layout.
You can add fields to the left side of the gantt chart (the white column before the gantt bars) and even make that area wider if you'd like to allow for more fields. How you do this differs depending on which version of the calendar you have.
Calendar Versions prior to v7
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 SampleEvents:
You'll want to copy and paste one of the fields already there--ideally a field from the same table occurrence you're hoping to add a field from--as the fields already there are conditionally formatted to only show on the right rows. This formatting prevents the project name, for example, for displaying on top of the event name for every event on the project.
Calendar Versions > 7
In order to get access to the fields in your events table you'll need to make a new relationship. On the relationships tab of manage database, create a new instance of your events table named something like "SampleEventsDirect" (append "Direct" to the name of the table occurrence you're using for events). Link this to CalendarRows as shown below:
Once that relationship is in place you can add any fields from "SampleEventsDirect" to a row on the gantt chart: this works in both the regular gantt chart and the one in WebDirect.
You can also add fields from table occurrences you'd like to related to "SampleEventsDirect".
When adding fields to the gantt chart be sure to apply a "hide objects when" calc so the new field only shows up on rows that are events. That hide calc is:
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 Calendar Settings - Each Redraw" by changing the value of the variable $$sc_GanttRows
