Posted by Gantt Chart under
Gantt Charts,
MS Project Tips
Here’s a handy tip when you want to draw a Gantt chart , if you’d like to show the relative week number from the project start next to milestone tasks in the WBS of the Gantt chart. You need to insert a calculated text field with to handle this.
Right click on the column header
- Select “Insert Column.”
- Select an unused custom text field name like “Text1″.
- Change the title to something like “Week #”.Now, you should see a blank column with the header “Week #” on it.
- Right click that new column header and choose “C ustomize Fields…”
- Click the “Formu la…” button
- Type the following formula into the formula dialog:
- CStr(1+DateDiff(”w”;[Project Start];[Start]))
I am a Project Manager at KPMG and I create a lot of Gantt charts to convey project schedules. It’s important to me to have solid Gantt chart software for this process.
As you all know, I abhor MS Project because of its lack of intuitiveness as well as stove piping a certain way of doing work. I checked out Merlin 2 to see if there was Gantt Chart software for the Mac that might use instead.
Continue reading this entry…
Posted by Gantt Chart under
.Net Gannt Charts,
Gantt Charts
ASE looks like they have a pretty nice component for embedding in .Net applications.  It appears that it will work in ASP.Net as well, which is pretty hot.
Check out their chart gallery of how it works when using it for Gantt Charts.
The Gannt Chart versions don’t look as hot as some of the others in their gallery, but I’m sure that’s configurable.
I can’t quite tell how the licensing works. It seems like you have to have parts resident on a separate server. Regardless, the $149 for the component will far outweigh the costs of having to write the darn thing yourself from scratch, the years of testing and debugging necessary to get it working just right, etc.
I say componentized software development is certainly the way to go.
Posted by Gantt Chart under
MS Project Tips
If you need to make the bars taller than 24 pixels high in Microsoft project, you don’t really have much of a choice, it would seem.
You are presented with a drop-down list, and the tallest selection available is 24. So, how do you make one bigger so that you can make it stand out from the rest or fill the page for a presentation?
Well, depending upon what you’re trying to do there are a few workarounds:
You could make another bar on the next row, and butt the two of them together through the Format -> Bar Styles dialog.
Then again, if you’re just trying to make the whole thing look bigger when you print it out, the Page Setup functionality will let you scale the whole thing up to fill the page.
OmniGroup just let the world know that OmniPlan 1.5 RC 1 is now available for download .
I’ve learned to despise all of the idiosyncracies of Micro$oft Project, and am always on the lookout for a management software. I need something that lets me easily add tasks, resources, baseline, compare schedules vs. actuals and as so frequently happens — allow people to book more time in a single work day than an 8 hour shift without rearranging my entire project plan for me. Jeez, that annoys the living crap out of me. </rant>
Okay, so I’m definitely going to pick up the demo version. I use a Wintel machine, but I also work with graphic artists who almost always work on their Mac. So, another great thing about OmniPlan is that there’s a Mac version available. I’ll keep you posted on how exciting the OmniPlan 1.51 release is, but let me tell ya… from the screenshots online, this is one super-sexy piece of project management software.
