Gantt Chart?

As far as I know, there is no specific tool to build Gantt charts in Numbers.
I'm quite sure that we may mimic them with bar charts and a bit of trickery (two superposed charts).

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 29 septembre 2008 16:03:18)

Prophecy,

It depends on how fancy you want to get. Project Management can be very complex to track and display and leads to special applications. MS Project comes to mind, but there are many others.

Here is a basic GANTT chart that you can do in Numbers. It's a horizontal, two-series, bar chart. The first series is the length of the total delay to the task start, and the second series is the duration of the task.



If you find Numbers limiting, you need something more powerful, but the learning thresholds can be substantial.

Regards,

Jerry

I will not respond about Office which like every µSoft product is not allowed to enter my home.

Jerrold posted a response using what I described as "a bit of trickery".

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE lundi 29 septembre 2008 17:30:29)

Hello Yvan,

I'm curious which part you think is trickery. My intent is to be transparent.

🙂

Jerry

I'm pretty sure MS Office is as unable as iWork in producing Gantt Charts. As far as I know, your best bet is to run MS Project in Windows emulation.

There are also a few Mac OS X applications at

versiontracker

but I have no experience of any of them.

Message was edited by: Magnus Lewan

Hi,


I don't have a MS or iWork solution, but this freeware program is pretty good for gantt charts. Maybe it's a little clunky, but from what I've seen it has decent functionality. Gantt Project: http://ganttproject.biz/

It's completely cross platform, which seems like what you are aiming for? I'm not sure why you were looking specifically for iWork/Office other than that you mentioned at one point you needed a windows-friendly program (which applies to MS).

Sorry if this isn't a help at all.


-John

There is a very good "project" program for the Mac from Project Wizards. Look for it in "downloads."

Regards,

I've tried several times making Gantts with MS Office and OpenOffice (haven't tried with iWork). The result is genereally quite unusable. You definitely can achieve a better result with http://ganttproject.biz/ that, as said above, is open source, free and multi platform. It has the ability to export to MS Project.
A better tool (IMO) and perfectly integrated in OSX is http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniplan/. It is (relatively) expensive but if you work often with gantts you can achieve a far better result than Ganttproject (also export to MS Project and a lot more).
If you seldom need a Gantt chart Ganttproject does the job better than any Office suite.

Try them and let us know,
Lorenzo

You're right Jerry.

I thought that you where using two superposed charts, forgotting the availability to chart several ranges of values in a single display.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 30 septembre 2008 10:24:14)

Basically it was a question to make it easier and cooperative in a Windows Environment. With such a response there's basically "Fanboy" behaviour because you think it doesn't work.

It seems that it's time for you to learn how to read.
I didn't say that µSoft products doesn't work. Just that as they aren't allowed to enter my home I don't know how they believe.
If you check the contents of Terms of use, you will see that this forum is dedicated to the way we may use Apple products, not do discuss what µSoft products may do. There are dedicated forums for this kind of question.

Yvan KOENIG (from FRANCE mardi 30 septembre 2008 10:28:50)

Jerrold

Your posted Gantt Chart is of interest (I am an architect and we need to programme our work). I used to use the spreadsheet in AppleWorks to do this (very basic, it is just a picture, but quick and easy to do and that is worth a lot). With the demise of AW I am just getting to grips with Numbers. Would it be possible for you to copy your prepared template to me? I would be grateful if so. I am not sure how I get in touch with you direct. You could contact me at my office on davidduckham@stwdarchitects.co.uk.

Incidentally, and others might be interested in this - we have just purchased the software Concept Draw. This includes the ability to interlink activities on a Gantt chart. Obviously that is better but it is taking one of my colleagues several days to try to understand how to get it to work. Not helped by the fact that it seems to come from Russia.

So I remain interested in your system - cheap and cheerful.

Having said that, Concept Draw is not too expensive and appears to be able to be used in quite a simple way once you have got to grips with it. I looked at numerous others and it looked to be a pretty good contender for what we want.

Going off at a tangent, when will Apple put a database into iWork?! Until they do, it is no good for an office. And not helped by the fact that it seems to be not at all straightforward to transfer records from an AW database to Bento or Filemaker