Ms project gannt chart software#
He said, “ The software seemingly randomly changes the format of the print output of Gantt charts. In MPUG’s recent top frustration survey, one responder explained his frustration when trying to present a consistent look and feel to printed Gantt charts. Remember that you can go back to the bar styles dialog (right-click in the Gantt view and select “Bar styles…”) to change the color to whatever you wish.Printing a Gantt chart can be a frustrating experience if you don’t take time to get used to the way printing in Microsoft Project works. If I expand the Gantt view to show more outline levels all the summary bars for WBS 1. I’ve customized fields Flag1 through Flag5 the same way,Īnd here is what the Gantt chart now looks like:
I renamed Flag1 to “WBS_1_Summary” as you can see here. Click on the “Rename…” button and enter a new name. Finally, and you don’t need to do this but I do to keep things clear, rename Flag1 to something that makes it’s use obvious. Next, in the “Calculation for task and group summary rows” section click the “Use formula” radio button.
Note again that when you save the formula you’ll get another “Existing data in the Flag1 field will be deleted….” warning dialog. To only color summary bars just change (Int(=1) Since we’re editing Flag1 we need to have it set to true if the WBS number starts with 1, so we write the formula as you can see here to accomplish this.īy the way, this will color everything and not just summary bars. Next, click the “Formula…” button and the formula entry dialog will display. This is OK, since we’re going to set the Flag using a formula.
When you do this Project will display warning you that you’ll lose all the existing values for the field. In the “Custom attributes” section in the middle of the dialog box select the “Formula” radio button. From the Project menu bar select “Tools” -> “Customize…” -> “Fields…”, and the Custom Fields dialog will be displayed.Īt the top right select “Flag” from the drop-down (the default is “Text”). Now that the bar styles are defined, we need to modify the Flag fields to have their values (True/False) for each task in the schedule calculated based on the task’s left-most WBS number. Also, the Flag field I’m using for each corresponds to the WBS left-most value, e.g., Flag4 for WBS 4. I’ve added several styles and given them rather obvious names. For example, the “WBS_1_Summary” style will be used whenever the field Flag1 is true. Add a new style by giving it a name, a unique format (color, pattern, shape, etc.), and specifying when it’ll be used.
What I’m going to do is assign a different color to all summary tasks based on their WBS number. I’ve formatted the gantt chart as I prefer to show the Name field to the left of each bar and the finish date to the right. Here’s a link to the project file before we customize the gantt chart with color. I’ve created a MS Project 2007 project schedule from a software development template supplied by Microsoft. One simple way to improve the readability is to colorize the gantt chart summary bars based on some criteria, e.g., left-most WBS number. For a small project it’s not so bad but for larger projects it gets difficult to pick out what part of the schedule is being looked at. Often times a larger project’s Gantt chart gets “busy” and hard to read.