Advanced Gantt Chart

Table of Contents

1. Showing Constraints Between Tasks
2. Customizing the Display
3. Configure Label Placement and Content
4. Configure Gantt
5. Configure Label Placement and Content
6. Exercise: Changing Labels
7. Configure Gantt
8. Plot Definition
9. Single Element Display
10. Exercise: Single Element Display

This tutorial will help you use the more advanced features in Aurora’s Gantt Chart view. Aurora’s Gantt Chart view is highly customizable and can be a powerful tool to help you understand your schedule.

Topics that will be covered in this tutorial are:

Showing constraints between tasks

Customizing the Display

Configure Label Placement and Content

Exercise: Changing Labels

Configure Gantt

Single Element Display

Exercise: Single Element Display

If you would like to follow this tutorial exactly as shown in the screenshots, download the Basic Template 9 Items.xml file and import it into Aurora. All screenshots have been taken using this very basic file.

Import the file as XML into Aurora by selecting File > Import/Export > Import from MS Project XML, as shown below

Showing Constraints Between Tasks

Open the Gantt Chart display in Aurora by clicking on the Displays menu -> Gantt Chart as shown below.

This is the default view that Aurora will show you.

To have full visibility of the chart. Click on the Zoom Out button. 

To show the constraints between tasks, click on the Configure how Constraints are Displayed button. 

This will bring up the Constraint Display Configuration dialogue box.

You can use this dialogue box to show the relationships between tasks on the Gantt Chart. For now, we will select the Show all constraints radio button at the top and click OK.

You will now notice that Aurora has added arrows to the Gantt Chart that show the relationships between the tasks.

To help decode what the colored arrows mean, you can have Aurora show the Legend by clicking on the Display Legend button .

The Legend helps you understand that red arrows denote a “Temporal Finish-Start” relationship and that teal indicates a “Start Driver” relationship, which indicates a resource-constraint.

Now you know what the different arrows mean, but it’s still difficult to see where they are with the current display. To help with this issue, the next section of this tutorial will now show you how to edit the way the Gantt Chart displays to make information easier to see.

Customizing the Display

In Aurora, by customizing the Gantt Chart view, you can more easily see the information that you need.

In the toolbar directly above the Gantt Chart, these two buttons will help you customize the way the chart appears:

	Configure Label Placement and Content Change the placement and content of labels as displayed on the Chart
	Configure Gantt Configure how the Chart area looks

Configure Label Placement and Content

As you can see in the screenshot below, the default in Aurora is to display the Start Hour and End Hour on either side of the bar that represents each Activity and the Primary Key Fn centered above the bar. Note that the Primary Key Fn typically denotes the IP Number of the Activity. The IP Number is also what is displayed on the PERT Chart in the Edit tab.

By clicking on the

 button, you will see the default view that Aurora displays:

Click on the ‘Create’ button,

, then click and drag with your mouse to draw a rectangle, and select a function from the dropdown menu.

Select the desired functions so that the result looks like this:

As you can see in the screenshot, the Label Configuration dialogue box provides you with a visual way to edit the labels and placement. The default blue-highlighted boxes (labels) can be moved by clicking and dragging with the mouse and also resized by clicking and dragging the corners (note that the cursor will not change when you hover over the corner). The labels will snap to the grid and can be rearranged anywhere inside the dialogue. The Create, Edit, Remove, and Copy buttons allow you to create new labels and delete unwanted labels as needed.

You can see the settings for each of the labels by clicking on them to highlight them in the upper half of the dialogue box. The Settings section will change with each label that is highlighted. You can change the function and alignment of each label using the drop-down boxes.

Now let’s do an exercise to change the Gantt Chart to clean up the display.

Exercise: Changing Labels

For this exercise, we will be changing the way the Gantt Chart displays by using the Label Configuration dialogue.

To help clean up the display and make it more readable, let’s start by getting rid of the Start Hour label on the left. The way this schedule was created, the Start Hour is typically midnight and we can declutter the display by getting rid of that label.

Start by highlighting the Start Hour label in the Label Configuration dialogue. You will notice that the Settings section of the dialogue box will update to display the information for the Start Hour label.

Now click on the Remove button to delete this label. It will disappear from the display. You will note that the Gantt Chart will update itself as you are making changes in the dialogue box. If you decided to hit cancel, the Start Hour label would reappear. The changes you make will not go into effect until you hit the OK button at the bottom.

We will now change the End Hour to read the total number of hours per Activity. Click on the End Hour label and choose Hour Duration from the Functions drop-down menu.

If you would also like to change the display font, you can click on the

 button and select a different font. We will not be changing the font in this exercise, but if you so desire you may.

If you hit OK in the Label Configuration dialogue box, you will see that the Gantt Chart view updates according to the edits you have made.

Configure Gantt

Now that we know how to change the labels and their placements, let’s see what else we can do with the Gantt Chart display using the Configure Gantt button which looks like this:

.

Clicking on this button will bring up the Gantt Plot Configuration dialogue.

We will only cover the Plot Definition tab in this tutorial.

Plot Definition

This tab shows you all the settings for the Gantt Chart Plot Area.

You can set how your Gantt Chart displays, including selecting the specific colors for each item in the display. For now, we will just remove the vertical lines from the Gantt Chart display. This will make it a bit easier to see the arrows that show the constraints between Activities.

Uncheck the Vertical Lines box and click OK at the bottom of this dialogue.

You will notice that now the Gantt Chart display is now much cleaner looking.

Still having trouble seeing how Activities relate to one another? You can try the Single Element Display to see a single Activity and its predecessors and successors.

Single Element Display

The Single Element Display

 will display any single, selected Activity and show its predecessors and successors.

Click on any Activity in the Gantt Chart view to highlight it. A highlighted Activity will have a bold dashed line outlining it.

When you have highlighted the desired Activity, click on the Single Element Display button

. It will bring up a display similar to that shown below.

As you can see, it is showing the workflow around Activity 6. The red arrows denote workflow and teal arrows denote resource-constrained workflow.

Exercise: Single Element Display

Taking a look at your schedule in Aurora’s Gantt Chart view, you wonder why there is a two day lag between when Activity 2 ends and Activity 6 begins.

You can visualize the PERT Chart display by clicking on the Displays menu -> PERT Chart as shown below.

To change the visuals of the chart, you may click the Auto-arrange plot elements button

 and the display size button

 in that order for a better view.  

If you look at the PERT Chart, you will also see that Activity 2 is the only predecessor to Activity 6. According to this workflow, Activity 6 should start right after Activity 2 ends.

So why is there a 2 day gap between when Activity T1 ends and Activity T5 begins? To figure this out, you can look at the Single Element Display.

By looking at the Single Element Display for Activity 6, you can tell that predecessors 2 and 5 must happen before 6, but now you know that 5 is a resource-constraining Activity (denoted by the teal arrow) so Activity 6 cannot start until Activity 5 has released enough resources. Similarly, you can also see that although Activity 7 is the workflow successor to Activity 6, both Activities 3 and 8 depend on the resources used by Activity 6; Activities 3 and 8 must wait for 6 to finish before they can start.