How to Create a Gantt Chart with Preceden

We’re excited to announce a powerful new feature of Preceden Timelines: the ability the create Gantt charts.

A Gantt chart is a timeline whose events can depend on other events. For example, say you’re a software developer and you know that your Alpha period starts on Jun 1, 2010 and it will last 4 weeks. Also, you know Beta will start as soon as Alpha ends, and you estimate it will take 6 weeks.

In the past, you could represent this on Preceden by making one event whose dates are June 1 to July 1 and a another event from July 1 to August 12. That would work, but there’s a few problems:

• You have to figure out when it ends. 6 weeks might be easy, but what if it was 6 weeks, 3 days? Or 8 months, 2 weeks, 4 days? Not as easy.
• You have to remember the date Alpha ends when you create Beta
• If you later determine that Alpha is actually going to take 4 weeks instead of 6, you have to figure out the new dates and adjust both events.
• If you have more than one event that depends on Alpha ending, it quickly becomes unmanageable

Enter Gantt charts.

Demo

1. On a new timeline, create an event called Alpha with a start date of June 1, 2010 and an end date of 4 weeks:

2. Create a second event titled Beta with a start date of =STARTOF and an end date of 6 weeks:

Voila! Just like that, you’ve created a Gantt chart representing your project timeline:

Gantt Charts Made Easy

Our goal was to make creating a Gantt chart as unobtrusive as possible so that if you want to use it, it’s easy, but if you don’t, it’s not going to get in the way of your normal work flow.

STARTOF and ENDOF

In order to create a Gantt chart, you’ll need to take advantage of two new functions when specifying your dates.

Simply place the name of the event you want that event to depend on in the quotes, and Preceden will take care of the rest.

Autocomplete

Additionally, since you might not always remember the exact name of events on your timeline, Preceden now has a nifty auto-complete feature that will show you the existing events as soon as you type =STARTOF(" or =ENDOF(" in one of the date fields:

You can then use your arrow keys or mouse to select the event you want.

Durations as End Dates

You can now use durations as end dates for events

Examples:

• 1 year
• 3 weeks 2 days
• 90 minutes
• 40 years 6 months 10 days 3 seconds

Circular References

Preceden will automatically detect circular references in your timeline.

What does that mean? Pretend you specified that Beta ends with Alpha starts and that Alpha starts when Beta ends. Or, a more familiar example: The Egg starts when the Chicken ends, and the Chicken starts when the Egg ends. Not going to work. If Preceden detects a circular reference, it simply won’t show the events on the timeline. Same goes for events that wind up having a start date that comes after the end date.

Dependency Lines

If you use the STARTOF or ENDOF functions for any of your events, a dotted line will be drawn between them indicating they are dependent. On the examples above you don’t see it because the events are next to each other, but if they’re at different vertical positions on the timeline, especially if they’re on different layers, you’ll definitely notice it:

Support

If you have any feedback, we’d love to here it. Drop a note on our UserVoice page or shoot an email to support@preceden.com. Thanks!