Gantt Chart Overview

Overview

Kantata OX's Gantt chart converts your project plan into a graphical representation of the entire project lifecycle. When leveraged in team meetings, it enhances accountability and communication, demonstrating how individual efforts affect the outcome of tasks and productivity of other team members.

The Gantt chart gives you the ability to:

• Check the overall health of your projects.
• Establish dependencies between tasks in a project.
• Expose potential pitfalls.
• Create baselines to show how the scope of your project shifts over time.
• Instantly view your project’s duration, budget, burn rate, and more.

There are three types of Gantt charts available in Kantata:

• Global Gantt chart —This gives you a high-level view of your active projects, providing a visual comparison between scheduled and actual dates. You can access it by opening Projects from the left navigation and clicking the Gantt view icon (“   ”).
• Local Gantt chart —This presents a more detailed look at each of your projects and the current status of all tasks and subtasks. The Local Gantt chart can be accessed by clicking the Gantt tab from within a project. 
• Tasks Gantt chart — This gives you a visual representation of how many tasks are currently in all your projects and how their progress is coming along. You can access it by hovering over Tasks in the left navigation and selecting Tasks Gantt.

Each Gantt chart is separated into two sections, with either the Projects (Global Gantt) or Tasks (Local and Tasks Gantt) list on the left and the Schedule on the right.
When you hover over the vertical line that separates the two sections, you’ll see two gray arrows appear. If you click the left-facing arrow, the left side minimizes and the right side expands, displaying a more complete view of the Schedule. Alternatively, if you click the right-facing arrow, the right side minimizes and the Projects or Tasks list expands.

The Projects and Tasks Lists

The columns in the Projects (Global Gantt) or Tasks (Local and Tasks Gantt) list contain information relevant to your projects. Some columns are initially hidden, and you can adjust the vertical line that divides the list from the chart to see everything.

Column Actions

There are a variety of column actions you can perform to make the Gantt experience more customizable. To start, you can reorder a column by clicking on the column header and dragging it to a new position.

You can also sort information in ascending or descending order by clicking on the column header or the small, gray arrow that appears to the right of the column name. Alternatively, you can right-click on the header and select Sort Ascending or Sort Descending from the corresponding drop-down menu. The small, gray arrow indicates which direction it's currently sorted.

If you want to apply a secondary sort, you can use the Multi-Sort option in the Local and Tasks Gantt Chart. For example, if you sorted by Task Type but you also want to list those items in ascending order by their Name, right-click the Name column, hover over Multi sort, and then select Add ascending sorter. 

To remove a multi sorter, right-click the column, hover over Multi sort and then select Remove sorter. If you want to hide or show columns, right-click the header, hover over Columns, and then check or clear the corresponding boxes.

Column Filters

Each column has a Filter option that allows you to filter the items that display in the column row. To do this, click the Filter icon (“   ”) to the right of the column name, and a filter option will appear.

The type of filter option will vary depending on which column you are filtering. For example, if you’re filtering the Task Type column, you can select Task, Deliverable, Milestone, or Issue from a drop-down menu.

On the other hand, if you’re filtering the Start date column, you’ll need to fill in dates for the On, Before, or After fields to provide a date range for the filter.

When you want to remove a filter, right-click the column header, and select Remove Filter from the drop-down.

Gantt Chart Schedule

The Schedule section displays the lifecycle of your project plan. To get a more complete view of the Schedule, hover over the vertical line between the two sections, and click the left-facing arrow on the top to collapse the panel. You can also click and drag the vertical line over to the left to minimize the left section.
The colored bars on the Schedule represent the project timeline for each corresponding project or task in the list.

• Green—Deadlines are being met; everything is healthy.
• Red—The project or task has not been started or completed before the deadline.
• Dark Green—The project or task has been completed.
• Blue—This is a parent task that has either been completed or has been started before the deadline.

The filled-in area of a bar represents the completion percentage of the task or project. Hover over any of the bars to see the scheduled Start and End dates, the Duration, and the percentage of the task or project that is Complete.

Gantt Chart Timeline Header

In the timeline header above the Projects or Tasks list and Schedule section, you can select Week, Month, or Year—as well as the Zoom In (“   ”) or Zoom Out (“   ”) icons—to move in or out on the timeline. To see all your active projects or tasks at once, click the Zoom to Fit icon.

Regardless of where you are on the timeline, you can click Default View at any time to return to the original view. This button also functions as a refresh button; click it to update the chart and see recent changes when multiple people are simultaneously working in the Gantt chart.

If you want to hide the project budget from the top portion of the Gantt chart, you can easily do so by clicking the Budget toggle to Off.

The Local Gantt chart has an Auto Save option in the timeline header. This feature automatically saves every change you make, which prevents you from accidentally losing any unsaved data.

If you prefer to turn Auto Save off, you can still manually save your progress whenever you’d like by clicking Save in the timeline header. Turning off Auto Save also allows you to Undo (“   ”) or Redo (“   ”) the most recent change(s) in the Local Gantt chart by clicking the corresponding icons in the timeline header. The red number above each icon indicates how many tasks can be undone or redone.