Gantt Chart View

A Gantt chart is a popular project management tool that displays tasks along a timeline, showing their duration, progress, and start and end dates. Tasks are listed vertically on the left, while horizontal bars (or Gantt bars) extend across the timeline on the right.

The Gantt view enables illustrating each task's progress, duration, milestones, assignees, and task dependencies. With PowerTable, you can create a fully customizable Gantt chart for your data, allowing you to visualize task schedules, identify dependencies, allocate resources, and track deadlines.

Beyond visualizing your data, you can easily add new tasks and subtasks, edit timelines, milestones, and dependencies on the fly, and seamlessly scale your data—all while tracking progress through an up-to-date Gantt chart.

1. Components of Gantt Chart for Task Management

Gantt chart

• Duration: The Gantt bars represent the duration of the task from the start to the end date across the timeline.

• Progress: Each bar has a slider that shows the task's progress. The multi-level timeline enables you to capture progress at a detailed level.

• Milestones: Track important events, deadlines, and a process's completion using milestones. When a task has an end date but no start date, or when there is an extra date field to indicate the milestones, these tasks are indicated as milestones.

• Dependencies: You can use connector lines to visualize project-level dependencies between the tasks. The direction of connector lines helps in indicating the type of dependency, such as Finish-Start, Start-Start, Finish-Finish, and Start-Finish.

• Formatting Gantt charts: Apply conditional formatting to quickly identify status/risks. You can also indicate the critical paths/dependencies to mitigate project risks well in advance.

Let's explore how to enable a basic Gantt view for your task table.

1. To generate a Gantt view, ensure your data consists of at least the 'Start Date' and 'End Date' fields along with the primary key field consisting of task IDs.

2. While PowerTable can automatically identify the data type of each field in the table, you must ensure that these date fields (Start Date, End Date, Milestone Date) are assigned the 'Date' data type in the initial table configuration window.

3. The field containing the list of unique tasks should be the primary key.

2. Creating Gantt Chart

Basic Gantt

Let's consider a sample table with a list of tasks with start and end dates and create a basic Gantt chart.

1. Click on Layout > Gantt.

Click on 'Gantt'

1. The Column Mapping pop-up opens.

• Start Date and End Date: Select the start date and end date fields in the relevant drop-down menus as shown below.

• Task ID: Since the Task ID is the primary key field in the table, it is automatically filled in the Task ID field.

• Click Apply.

Column Mapping for Gantt

If you want to create an advanced Gantt chart with additional information like milestones, progress, and dependencies, add these details to the database as additional fields.

Then, using the Gantt Layout Configuration pop-up, map these fields to the appropriate dropdown menus. To know more, refer to this section : Advanced Gantt Chart.

1. The Gantt view appears as shown below. This is a basic Gantt chart.

Gantt Chart View

Advanced Gantt Chart

Let's now create an advanced Gantt chart indicating progress, milestones, and dependencies. In addition to the start and end dates, the table includes three other fields:

• A numeric field to track progress

• A date-type field to indicate milestones

• A VARCHAR-type field to log connection details.

The above components are explained here.

1. Click on Layout > Gantt to create a Gantt chart.

If you've already set up a basic Gantt and want to include these additional fields or change a few mapped fields, select Layout > Manage Layout.

Manage Gantt Layout

1. Assign the fields to relevant drop-down menus to generate a Gantt view.

Assign the fields

Parent ID: Assign the Parent ID field here, if applicable, to organize tasks in parent-child hierarchical format. For Gantt view, this attribute is optional—assigning this only shows the task list arranged hierarchically.

(OR)

Hierarchy By: If there is no Parent ID field but the data has a hierarchical relationship, you can specify which field to organize the list by.

Milestone: Assign the 'Milestone' date field here. It should be a date data type.

While PowerTable can automatically identify the data type of each field in the table, you must ensure that these date fields (Start Date, End Date, Milestone Date) are assigned the 'Date' data type in the initial table configuration window.

Progress: Select the '% Completion' or 'Progress' field here. It is a number field indicating the task progress using numbers.

Dependency: Assign the 'Dependency' field to capture task connection details. This field uses the format 'TaskID-ConnectionType', for example, 1002FS. Here, 1002 is the task ID, and FS indicates that the current task starts only after task 1002 has finished. Other connection types include SS (Start-Start), SF (Start-Finish), and FF (Finish-Finish).

1. Click Apply.

The Gantt view is shown below:

Gantt Chart View

In the absence of a 'Milestone' field, PowerTable can still assign milestones to tasks with no start date but an end date.

Milestone - automatically created

Similarly, when there are no progress or dependency fields in the database and you move the slider on any Gantt bar or manually draw connector lines on Gantt, PowerTable generates database columns named 'Progress' and 'Connect To' to indicate the task's progress and connection details.

Progress and Connector fields added automatically

It should be noted that the 'Progress' and 'Connect To' columns created by PowerTable are database columns and will only become a part of the table after a 'Save' or a writeback operation.

In the next section, we'll discuss the customization options available for Gantt Chart.