Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013.
In this section we’re going to take an introductory look at formatting a Gantt Chart and the first
thing I want to show you is how to use the Gantt Chart Wizard.
Perhaps what I should say is the first thing I’m going to show you is how to find the
Gantt Chart Wizard because for some reason that I’ve never fully understood the Gantt
Chart Wizard is not readily at hand.
But we’ll use this as an opportunity to show you again how to add a command to the
Quick Access Toolbar, and if you’re feeling brave, you could even create a Ribbon Group
and put this command in your group on the Ribbon.
But we’ll stick with the Quick Access Toolbar.
So I’m going to click on the little drop down button to the right hand end, click on
More Commands.
So first of all, let’s go to Commands not in the Ribbon and then scroll down to Gantt
Chart Wizard, click on Add, click on OK, and the Gantt Chart Wizard is now visible on the
Quick Access Toolbar.
It’s that little magic wand icon up in the corner there.
So let’s take the Gantt Chart Wizard for a spin.
Click on Gantt Chart Wizard.
The first screen we see in the wizard is a welcome screen.
Click on Next and we get a choice on the kind of information we want to display in the Gantt
Chart.
Now by default the type is standard which is pretty much what we’ve got now really.
It’s just a standard out of the box Gantt Chart but you can choose to show just critical
path or to show just a baseline.
Or if you select Other, then you choose from a number of styles of standard or baseline
or status or critical path.
Now to know what each of these is going to look like, you’ve got this little preview
box here.
So if I go for standard style one, that’s previewed.
Let’s style baseline style one.
Let’s try critical path style two and so on.
So you choose the style that you want.
I’m going to go for one of the standard styles.
I think I’m going to try standard style three.
Having chosen the style, click on Next and now you’re asked what task information you
want to display with your Gantt bars.
Now at the moment what you’re shown is the resources.
Note there on the right of the bars there, so we’ve got Bill and Sue as the resources,
and dates.
So where we’ve got a milestone, you can see a date.
But I could see just resources.
I could see just dates.
Note that the dates on the non-milestone task show you the start and finish.
Or I could choose None.
So I’m going to go with resources and dates, click on Next.
Next choice.
Do you want to show links between dependent tasks?
So do I want to see my dependency arrows?
Yes I do want to see those, so click on Next.
And now I’ve answered all the questions I need to for the Gantt Chart Wizard to do
its job.
So when you’re ready and you’re happy with the selections you’ve made, you click
on Format it and what the Gantt Chart Wizard now does is to format your Gantt Chart in
the way that you’ve said.
And then when you finish, click on Exit Wizard and you can see how it looks and see the sort
of changes that it’s made there to our Gantt Chart.
Now the Gantt Chart Wizard is a pretty quick, slick way of achieving a fairly smart looking
Gantt Chart without too much effort.
But the Gantt Chart formatting tools in Project 2013 are a lot more extensive than that.
I could spend a long time going through all of the available tools and functions but I’m
just going to give you a quick couple of examples here and then I’ll leave you to investigate
these further yourself.
If I take say the table here.
Let me move the Gantt Chart out of the way.
Let’s just look at this table.
Suppose I were to select three columns in the entry table here.
On the Task tab I have a Font Group and within the Font Group I have text formatting controls
and I could format the text in there in exactly the same way that I would format text in,
say, Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel.
I’ve even got a little dialog box launcher in the bottom right hand corner of the group
that gives me access to a Font dialog, and in that Font dialog I could change the font
that I want to use there.
So let’s have a hand written font.
I could choose Italic 14 point, completely unsuitable but let’s click on OK and in
that way I can format the content of the table there is pretty much anyway that I like.
Now that may look rather grotesque in the context of a Microsoft Project schedule but
if you’re trying to fit this into another document, you’ve got a certain style that
you’re using, it can be very useful to have such extensive formatting capabilities.
Also, as I’m going to demonstrate briefly a little bit later on, you can of course export
and import information from other applications such as Excel and being able to deal with
different formatting options can be extremely useful.
Anyway on this occasion I’m going to undo that particular piece of formatting and turn
my attention back to the actual chart in this Gantt Chart.
So we have a Gantt Chart Tools Format tab and if I click on that, I have a number of
options there.
Apart from doing work on the columns in the table there, I can look at text styles and
I can look at bar styles and I can look at the overall Gantt Chart style.
So, for instance, if I start with Gantt Chart style, if I click on the More drop down there,
I have a gallery of styles that I can choose from.
And then if I want to format the bars in a different way, if I go into Bar Styles and
look at format, click on the drop down, I can format individual bars like that that’s
for a selected task or I can format a bar style.
By formatting a bar style, I’m formatting all of the bars for a particular function
of bar.
Let me show you what I mean by that.
In the Bar Styles dialog, I am given a list of the various types of bar that I may see
in a Gantt Chart.
So I’ve got task which is the regular task.
I’ve got split.
You’ve already seen a split task before.
That’s the dot, dot, dot pattern.
The milestone, a diamond.
Summary task which is this sort of black bar with little vertical bars at each end.
Project summary task, group by summary, rolled up tasks, and so on.
If I choose one of these types, let’s take the regular task.
In the bottom, I have two tabbed controls.
One of them is bars, one of them is text.
The text one at the moment says that on the right I’ve got the resource names.
I can put the text on the left, the right, the top, the bottom, the inside.
I can have some text to the left, some to the right, some inside.
I can have text in all positions if I like.
Supposing I want to change this from resource names to resources initials.
So let me just go through there.
I’m going to show not the resource names but resource initials.
You can see just below this dialog a couple of the bars in the current version of the
Gantt Chart.
You can see how the resource names are shown there.
I’m going to change them to initials.
And as far as the bars go, I could say put a shape at the start, change the type and
color of the start.
End, shape, type, color.
And in the middle I can change the shape of the bar, pattern on the bar, and the color
of the bar.
Let’s suppose that I’m going to change the color of the middle bar.
I’m going to go for a standard color.
Why don’t I go for that sort of bluish color there?
And I’m going to put a shape at the start and a shape at the end.
Supposing I’m going to use that little vertical bar there and a shape at the end, same at
the other end, click on OK, and let’s see what happens to all of the standard tasks
in my Gantt Chart.
What you can now see is that they all have a neat little black bar at the beginning and
end, and on the right instead of having the full resource names, I’ve got those resource
initials that I entered much earlier in the course.
So in that way you can format a Gantt Chart with a very, very high level of control.
Now as I said earlier in this section I’m not going to go through all of those options
now.
As you can see there are many of them, but I hope there’s enough for you to be going
on with there that you can investigate and experiment further with it yourself.
So that’s what we’re going to cover now on formatting a Gantt Chart.
Please join me in the next section.