Posts Tagged ‘gantt’

SharePoint Planner – New Version Release, every minute counts!

Date:August 25th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Planner Comments:0 ;

We were recently contacted by a customer who was going to be responsible for organizing a visit from a Very, Very important person. The visit would only last a couple of hours, but would involve many people and needed to be planned down to the minute.

The client wanted an easy to use graphical representation of the project, in SharePoint, for everyone to refer to and update as the event progressed.

Let’s take a look at how the project might have looked in an out of the box calendar view:

Hmmm, don’t think that’s really giving us the kind of info we need.  We have 7 items here, scheduled over a 3 hour period from 12 noon to 3pm, items fall in to different categories and are assigned to different people.  We’re not really getting that from this view are we?

Actually, the view is quite misleading.  The first event “Close Streets to Traffic” looks as though it lasts for one hour from 12.00 to 13.00 right? Wrong, this is actually a 40 minute event, starting at 12 and finishing at 12.40.  This may not seem like a big deal but there are times when this kind of accuracy really matters – it’s easy to see how running 20 minutes late at a VIP event could lead to VIP tantrums!

So how about the out of the box Gantt Chart? OK, so we have access to a little more info on who is doing what, but now we can see nothing at all on timings.

We can zoom though, and this is what we get when we do maximum zoom.

Well it’s certainly an improvement, but it’s not great is it?  We are on maximum zoom here are it’s still quite difficult to see the detail of what’s happening when.

We thought we could do better.  So we added to SharePoint Planner the ability to set timescales to 10 or 15 minutes.  We think this gives a much clearer view for fast moving projects like this. Either in the classic Gantt view, most usually used for projects: Or in a category view for exactly what each of your team members should be doing at any one time:

The new 10 and 15 minute scheduling options allow you to schedule events more accurately and deploy resources more effectively.

This is a new feature in Planner version 2.6.6, so if you are using an older version of the software it would be worth upgrading now.

Or if you don’t yet use SharePoint Planner why not give it a try today with 30 day free trial?

5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts

Date:February 3rd, 2010 Author: Tags: , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:6 ;

Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget what it was like to be a new SharePoint user.  Sometimes you need a wakeup call to remind you of the “WOW” moments of delighted surprise when you discovered an amazing new feature, and the “AAAGGGGGHHHH!” moments of frustration, when you hit upon something SharePoint obviously should do, but for some inexplicable reason just doesn’t.

We got our wakeup call this week when we were putting together a product features chart for our Planner web part – which is an easy to use planning tool, with a Gantt chart view.  We like to do this with all our products, to see how we stack up against the competition, and against SharePoint out of the box.

When we looked at SharePoint out of the box, some of the basic things that you would expect from a Gantt chart just weren’t there.  Here are our top 5 “missing in action” feature in SharePoint Gantt charts:

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Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart

Date:October 14th, 2009 Author: Tags: , , , , , ,
Category: Calculated Columns, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:1 ;

There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.

With Planner you can show multiple columns in the Category or on the Timeline of a Gantt chart by using a calculated column to merge fields together.

concat-columns
For example to merge Priority and Title columns together you would :-


  • From your list click Settings > Create Column
  • Set a name such as “Category”
  • Choose Calculated for the type
  • In formula enter (where [Title] etc is the name of the columns you want to merge)
      =[Priority] & " : " & [Title]
  • Uncheck ‘Add to default view’ checkbox if you don’t want this appearing for the normal list view.
  • In Planner you can now select this column.

You can merge multiple columns together, for example :-

   =[Priority] & " : " & [Title] & " - " & [Assigned To]

You can also use SharePoint standard functions and formula (many similar to excel) such as :-

   =Text([Start Time],"mmm-yyyy") " : " & [Title]

Which would prefix the Title with Month and year, like so  October-2009 : Your title here

To display the the duration in days you could use

   =DATEDIF([Start Time],[End Time],"d") & " Days"

See some more examples of common functions

Adding gridlines to the SharePoint Planner webpart Gantt chart

Date:October 30th, 2008 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

Update – an option to use horizontal gridlines has now been built into version 2.4

Alessandro from Italy contacted us wanting to know if there was a way of adding gridlines to SharePoint Planner so it’s easier to visually connect up the column on the left with the corresponding timeline.

With a few Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) ninja moves you can change the display from something like this.

Planner Gridlines Example

The following snippet does the trick and can be added to an individual page using a Content Editor Web Part thereby changing just the Planner web parts that appear on that page.

DIV.SharePointPlanner2 TABLE.plgx_Default TR TD
{
border-bottom : 1px solid #B9D1F4;
}

Alternatively you can add it to the SharePointPlanner.css file that all planner web parts use or download one that’s already been edited. There can be multiple copies of this file depending on how you install SharePoint and Planner and they can be in different places so it’s best to do a file search and replace them all.

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