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
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, or when a task's start and end dates are the same, 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.
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).
While PowerTable can automatically identify the data type of each field in the table, you must ensure that these date fields are assigned the 'Date' data type in the table configuration window.
The field containing the list of unique tasks should be a NOT-NULL column. It can also be a primary key.
2. Basic Gantt Chart
Click on Layout > Gantt.
The Column Mapping pop-up opens.
Select the start date and end date fields in the relevant drop-down menus as shown below.
In the Task ID menu, select the field that contains the task list.
Note that the Task ID is auto-populated with the table's primary key field, which in this case is 'ID'. This menu also displays a list of other NOT-NULL key fields in the table, which you can select if they represnt the list of tasks.
Click Apply.
The Gantt view appears as shown below. This is a basic Gantt chart.
3. Advanced Gantt Chart
Let's now create more advanced Gantt charts indicating progress, dependencies, and milestones. Your data can optionally have three additional fields—a date field to indicate milestones, a VARCHAR field to log connection details, and a numeric field to track progress.
You can then click on Layout > Manage Layout and assign these fields to relevant dropdown menus to generate a Gantt view.
In the absence of these fields, PowerTable assigns milestones to tasks with the same start and end dates or tasks with no start date but an end date. Similarly, when you move the slider on any Gantt bar or manually draw connector lines on Gantt, PowerTable creates database columns named 'Progress' and 'Connect To' to indicate the task's progress and connection details.
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