Introduction to CC Gantt Charts

CC Gantt is sold as a developer's template to help FileMaker developers integrate sophisticated Gantt Charting into their projects. Most developers will likely want to learn about CC Gantt by diving in and examining the system directly. This overview has been prepared for those who might want more of a guided tour of how to use CC Gantt Charts, as opposed to how to integrate or modify it.

CC Gantt Chart is a tool to let you visualize project milestones in the Gantt format. It is not a project management system itself but rather is designed to be hooked up to an existing project management system. Alternately, you can use the Pro Version of CC Gantt Chart as the beginning of a new project management system. The Pro Version comes with simple (very simple) databases of Projects and People, which are meant to be replaced with corresponding databases in systems you may already have. Of course if you don't already have a project management system, you could begin building out these databases to let CC Gantt function as the beginnings of your new system.

In the following sections we'll discuss how to use the Free Version of CC Gantt before we get into how to use all the visualization features in the Pro Version. The charts produced by the Pro Version of CC Gantt are, we believe, some of the most practical and elegant project tracking charts out there. We hope you find them useful.

Projects and Milestones

CC Gantt Charts allows you manage "milestones" according to the dates they are due and according to their status. Milestones can be different things to different people, but in a Project Management context, milestones are the line items of a Project. In other words, any given Project may have any number of Milestones. Think of milestones as tasks within a project. So, in a software development project, we may have milestones representing the completion of research, the building of a specification, presenting the specification to the client, etc.

In CC Gantt, milestones may be thought of as having one discrete due date, or they may have both a start and an end date. For instance...