Now we all know that SharePoint Lists are pretty amazing things: easy to use, searchable, customizable… Where would we be without them?
But did you know that each list type comes with its own special “Superpower”?
If you understand the different superpowers of each list type it makes choosing which list to use on any given occasion much easier.
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One of our New Years Resolutions for 2010 was to: “find out how people really use our stuff”. We really want to understand how people use our Planner, Reminder and Pivot Point in the real world. We know we have clients from a huge range of industry sectors, so it will be great to see how our software helps with the special challenges of your area. And we know that some of you use 2 or 3 of our products together: we would love to know what you are doing there. So this year we want to find out how you use our products in your SharePoint environment. If we know how you use them it will help us to improve them! Just send us a quick email telling us a bit about your business and how you use our products and we will enter you into our free prize draw for the chance to win a funky Flip video camera. We would really appreciate your help on this one, so if you have a minute free please send us a quick email. |
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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:
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.
For example to merge Priority and Title columns together you would :-
=[Priority] & " : " & [Title]
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"
We are happy to be able to let you know that a German version of the Pentalogic Planner web part for SharePoint is now available.
Although Planner was already partially localized for German, so that German end users would have see Month and Day names in their own language, administration and set up screens were previously only available in English and French.
A new version (2.5.4) of SharePoint Planner webpart is available to download with the following minor changes :-
Regional Setting in WSS3.0
You can simply download and install the new version – there is no need to remove the old version first.
Thanks to Michael C and Michael S for these suggestions!
A new version (2.5.3) of SharePoint Planner is available to download with the following changes :-
You can simply download and install the new version – there is no need to remove the old version first.
A new version (2.5.0) of SharePoint Planner Webpart is available to download.
The main change is the interface has been fully localized in French.
In addition :-
You can simply download and install the new vesion – there is no need to remove the old version first.
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.
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.
