The Gantt chart became a standard way of visualizing schedules when, in the early 20th century, American engineer Henry Gantt developed a bar chart showing the use of resources over time. For many people, a Gantt chart is synonymous with a project’s sched-ule or plan and is a popular and widely understood representation of schedsched-ule information throughout the project management world. In Project, the default view is dominated by a Gantt chart. You are likely to spend a lot of your time in this view when working in Project.
TIP By default, when you create a new plan Project displays a split view named Gantt with Timeline. However, you can change this setting to display any view you want as the default view for a new plan. On the File tab, click Options. In the Project Options dialog box, click General. In the Default View box, click the view you want. The next time you create a new plan, the view you have chosen will appear.
A Gantt chart view consists of two parts: a table on the left and a bar chart on the right.
The bar chart includes a timescale band across the top that denotes units of time. The bars duration, and status (for example, whether work on the task has started or not). On a Gantt chart, tasks, summary tasks, and milestones all appear as Gantt bars or symbols, and each type of bar has its own format. Whenever you work with Gantt bars, keep in mind that they represent tasks in a plan. Other elements on the chart, such as link lines, represent relationships between tasks. You can change the formatting of almost any element on a Gantt chart.
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The default formatting applied to a Gantt chart view works well for onscreen viewing, sharing with other programs, and printing. However, you can change the formatting of almost any element on a Gantt chart. There are three distinct ways to format Gantt bars:
you can see on the Format tab when a Gantt chart is displayed.
Apply highly customized formatting to Gantt bars in the Bar Styles dialog box, which you can open by clicking the Format tab when a Gantt chart is displayed, and then, in the Bar Styles group, clicking Format, Bar Styles. In this case, the formatting changes you make to a particular type of Gantt bar (a summary task, for example) apply to all such Gantt bars in the Gantt chart.
Format individual Gantt bars directly. The direct formatting changes you make have no effect on other bars in the Gantt chart. You can double-click a Gantt bar to view its formatting options, or, on the Format tab in the Bar Styles group, click Format, Bar.
For more information, see Chapter 17.
The scenario: At Lucerne Publishing, you are almost done with planning the new book launch project and the team is about to commence work. The plan you developed is getting broader exposure inside Lucerne Publishing, and you want to format the plan to highlight a key milestone. You also want a few other details from the plan to visually stand out.
In this exercise, you change the formatting of different elements in a Gantt chart view.
SET UP
To begin, you will view the Gantt bar for a manually scheduled task. Then you will adjust the colors of the Gantt bars and milestones in the chart portion of the Gantt Chart view, and see how a manually scheduled task’s Gantt bar is formatted.
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In the column, click the name of task 9, Prepare book P&L statement.2
On the tab, in the group, click .TIP You can accomplish the same thing by right-clicking the task name and, in the shortcut menu that appears, clicking Scroll To Task.
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Project scrolls the chart portion of the Gantt Chart view to display the Gantt bar for a manually scheduled task that was previously added to the book launch plan. As you can see, the Gantt bar of this manually scheduled task does not look like the Gantt bars of the automatically scheduled tasks.
Keep an eye on this Gantt bar as you apply a different Gantt chart style to the plan.
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On the Format tab, in the group, click to display theThe More button
The formatting options under Scheduling Styles distinguish between manual and automatically scheduled tasks, but the Presentation Styles do not.
The Gantt Chart styles are divided into two groups:
Scheduling Styles distinguish between manually and automatically scheduled tasks.
Presentation Styles do not make that distinction.
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Under , click the orange color scheme.Project applies this style to the Gantt bars in the plan.
The Gantt bar of task 9, the manually scheduled task, is no longer visually distinct from the automatically scheduled tasks.
Applying a presentation style to the Gantt Chart view is an option you can use when you don’t want to distinguish between manual and automatically scheduled tasks—
when showing the Gantt chart to an audience for whom you do not want to make this distinction, for example.
Your next step in this exercise is to reformat a task name so that it will visually stand out.
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In the column, right-click the name of task 6,launch at Lucerne Publishing. You’d like to highlight this task name.
In addition to the regular shortcut menu, note the Mini Toolbar.
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On the Mini Toolbar, click the arrow next to the button, and under , click yellow.TIP You can also click the Task tab, and in the Font group, click Background Color.
Italic button.
Background Color button.
Project applies the yellow background color to the task name’s cell.
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On the Mini Toolbar, click the button.Now the milestone task name stands out.
TIP You can quickly remove all text formatting that’s been applied to a value in a cell.
On the Task tab, in the Editing group, click Clear (looks like an eraser), and then click Clear Formatting.
You can also format the milestone indicator in the chart. You’ll do this next.
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With the name of task 6 still selected, on the Format tab, in the group, click and then click Bar.9
In the Format Bar dialog box, under Start, click the drop-down list.Project displays the symbols you can use as a Gantt bar starting edge or, in this case for a milestone, as a milestone symbol.
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Click the star symbol, and then click .Project uses the star symbol as the milestone symbol for this task.
This milestone symbol has been formatted with a custom shape.
TIP In this exercise, you used the Bar command to format a single item on the Gantt Chart view. You can also customize entire categories of Gantt bars, such as all milestones, via the Bar Styles command. For more information, see Chapter 17.
As you might have noticed already, Project automatically draws horizontal lines in the chart portion of a Gantt chart view for just the selected task. These lines help you visually track from the task’s name and other information on the left side of the view to its Gantt bar or symbol on the right. To conclude this exercise, you will add horizontal gridlines for all tasks in the Gantt Chart view.
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On the Format tab, in the Format group, click , and then click .12
Under , leave Gantt Rows selected, and in the box under Normal, select the small dashed line (the third option down), and then click . Project draws dashed lines across the chart portion of the Gantt Chart view.With these dashed lines displayed, the solid horizontal lines Project draws for the selected task are still clearly visible.