Finishing Touches for the Gantt Chart (3/3)

Ok, if you still here with me. I think you must have tried very hard to get the Gantt chart working. So here are the final steps.

1. Scaling the Y-Axis


The Y-axis scale needs to be set so that you can see the starting and ending dates in the timeline.

Set the chart to intervals of 61 days, alternate months are normally either 30 or 31 days.

So I use a bi-monthly interval of 61. How neat is that ??? This is because my chart counts in days.

Its a bit awkward to set a monthly interval. Its not very much more awkward to use a weekly interval or yearly interval. The chart is useful anyhow.

2. Formatting the starting and ending date text. This is what you want to see straight off the bat. Use a nice bold font like an Accent SF font.

To get a picture perfect Gantt chart.It customary to rotate the axis by 90 degrees so that the time line is horizontal, rather than vertical. Unfortunately I don't think a method exists to do that yet in Open Office 3.0. You can take a printout though and flip the chart in the book ;). This simple Gantt chart will give you all the minimum information you need to plan and forecast, as well as auto-updating the chart when your time frame changes.

If you like this article please do leave your feedback and suggestions.

Formatting The Gantt Chart (2/3)

Here I cover how to format the chart to give it that Gantt look .

This is an important (and confusing) topic.

If you feel frustrated at any time you can Undo the last step with the Ctrl+Z shortcut.Carefully follow my advice, and with just the

help of Open Office, you can transform

your timelines into an inexpensive

but splendid looking Gantt

Chart.

The chart updates automatically at any changes in the source data tables. I have never seen this even in professional Gantt tools. Ah ... the wonder of Open Source!

1. Select the chart with a double click.

2. Formatting the Y -axis :

With the mouse select the Y-Axis to bring up the Y-axis format dialog box.

This dialog box can also be called from the Format

Menu -> Axis -> Y-Axis.

a.Select the Numbers tab

in the dialog box and uncheck the Source Format checkbox. ( I think this is a bug in Open Office... but what do I know ?).

b. Now manually select the date format for the Y-axis.

c. Click OK when Done.

The chart changes to reflect the tasks by Date.

3. Now we have suddenly discover that our plots are wrong,

because our data series table actually has two Y-Axis on different

scales and dimensions. Albeit it shows the same unformatted scale as the primary axis.

No problem.

From the Insert Menu -> Insert Axes -> Select the secondary Y-Axis checkbox and click OK , a secondary Axis is generated,

Format the secondary Y-Axis scale by selecting it with the mouse or from the menu Format ->Axis-> Secondary Y-Axis ...

Now un-check automatic checkbox, and change the scale Minimum to 0%, the scale Maximum to 100% and scale interval to 10%.

In the Numbers tab of the Y-axis

formatting

dialog box, un-check the source formatting check-box and select the percentage format.

Now we have our data series... with two axes in different dimensions.

Awesome !

4. Replacing our start date and end dates with Text.

Ok ... formatting the data series can be tricky because sometimes they will be literally off the chart. There is no menu option to do this easily.

So with the mouse double click the end date data series.

Select the Data Labels tab, then check Show value as number.

Click the button Number format ... and then uncheck the source format checkbox to change to a date format.

In the Placement dropdown combo box select Near Origin. Select No line for Borders and No fill for Areas.

Repeat the same for the Start date data series only choose the value Inside for the Placement dropdown.

5. Binding the data series dimension to the correct axis.

Select the line chart data series, completed % or remaining %

Under the options tab.align data series to secondary Y-axis.

Repeat the same for all the line series.

Ok if you got this far I think you can find the rest of the way... Let me know how it goes.

Gantt Chart with Open Office Calc (1/3)

Here is a simple Gantt Chart template constructed with Open Office.

This also shows the percentage of task completed!

Steps are outlined as below.

1. Construct the data tables as given in the picture.

Date and time are in MM/DD/YY format.

To calculate the end date in Cell F2 enter the formula

=C2+D2+E2

To calculate the completed task percentage in cell H2 enter the formula

=D2/(D2+E2) and then click the % shortcut on the toolbar.

2. Once the adhoc data is created we now commence to create the Gantt chart as follows

a. Select the table and on the Insert Menu, select Chart...

b. With the helpful chart wizard

i. Choose the Columns and Lines Chart type

ii. Choose the Number of Lines to plot 2 , this will display the last 2 columns in the table as Line charts.

iii.Check if your data range and headers are correct, optionally if series are in rows and not columns, edit here, rather than transpose.

iv. Remove any unnecessary data ranges, usually less clutter is more meaningful .

v. Edit the axis titles and legends

vi. Click Finish

And there you have it, a beautiful Gantt chart appears. It now only remains to do the appropriate chart formatting which will be shown in the next article. Till then adieu.