Tutorial - using Gantt charts

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Introduction

Gantt charts in combination with Action items are a flexible way to plan a project. The actions indicate a starting date and duration (in days) so you plan a range of days for that specific action. Actions allow an indication of how much the action has progressed. Let's go through the process of using a Gantt chart to visualize a small project.

Creating actions

Create a group and a few actions. Make sure you give them a duration of a couple of days. See below for an example action dialog.

Once a few actions have been added, click on the 'Gantt' button in the menu ribbon and enable 'Show Gantt chart' and 'Show progress'. The first option displays the date display, and the second option fills each bar to indicate the 'progress' value from the action dialog.

Your screen might look a bit like this (here the user has right-clicked on the 'Build home' group; also, a number of other items were included next to just actions):

What is shown onscreen

If you look more closely at the above screenshot, you can see the Organiser visualises the various items slightly differently:

• Overdue actions (for which the end date has passed) are shown with red text and a red bar, unless the action has been marked as 100% complete.
• Currently active items are marked using a green bar. These are actions that should currently be worked on.
• Future actions are presented using a gray bar.

Also notice that the group items show a summary range for all the visible items in that group. This allows you to quickly oversee a planning period for each group or subgroup (for large projects you can subdivide the actions to be taken into groups; a tutorial on groups can be found here).

The actions are ordered by their start date, so things that start sooner can be found at the top of the list in each group. Last but not least, notice the fat black line; this indicates 'today'.

Modifying the planning

You can change the original plans as the project comes along. This can be done for entire groups and for individual items.

To change a single action, right-click on the item and choose whether to reschedule the action forward or backward in time, or modify the original duration. This can be done per day, week or 4 weeks. The screenshot below shows how the user modifies the selected action and reschedules it to take place one week later.

Modifying an entire group can be done by right-clicking the group (in the item list view) and selecting similar menu items. The changes will apply to all items in that group and its subgroups.

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