Category Archives: Best Practices

Percent Complete Color Coding

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For anyone who has created a schedule, one of the essential things to know is percent complete. Users of OnePager know we already offer ways to show percent complete via a yellow bar, text, or a checkmark. However, we will dive into another method: color coding different tasks based on a percent complete range.

We will first want to determine what percent complete ranges we want to create rules for and what color will represent them. In this example, I will be using the following ranges.

0% – 25% | 26% – 50% | 51% – 75% | 76% – 100%

Once you have decided on your rules, create a chart from your source file.
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Multiple Values in Conditional Formatting

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In my view, among the many great features of OnePager, none beat Conditional Formatting. With Conditional Formatting, you can create rules to change the color, shape, fill, and other properties of tasks and milestones based on specific rules that you set. However, what happens when you have multiple values to which you need the same rule to apply? You could create a bunch of separate rules, but that’s a lot of work. In this article, we will go over how you can create a conditional formatting rule that tests for multiple conditions at once.

Imagine with me, if you will, that you have a schedule with individual resources assigned to different tasks. Each resource is part of a specific team in your organization, and you would like to be able to color tasks based on the team that the people belong to, not based on their individual names.

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Setting a Task’s Finish Time in Excel

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When creating a schedule in an Excel spreadsheet, you will have a Start date and Finish date. But there is also a time associated with those dates, and if you don’t set it, your tasks may appear to finish earlier than expected. In the example below, both tasks finish on the seventh day, but the blue task finishes at 12:00 a.m. and the red task finishes at 11:59 p.m., almost a full day later. Paying attention to the times associated with your dates in Excel will help you ensure that a task is scheduled correctly.

This blog will go over an addition to make to the formula in your Excel spreadsheet to change the time of your task Finish date.

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Timeline without Dates

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With a Gantt chart, you can display Start/Finish dates that show exactly when a task starts and finishes. However, in this blog, we will be creating a dateless chart to show a graphical representation of your schedule without any specific dates displayed. 

We will start at the top of the chart with the Time Axis representing different tic units. In the example, we utilize the Month and Week units of the Time Axis.

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Identifying Late and Very Late Tasks with Finish Variance

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In Microsoft Project, a field called Finish Variance shows how many days there are between the Finish and the Baseline Finish fields. Using this data can be helpful when trying to determine if your tasks are finishing on, before, or after their planned finish dates.

If you want to use the Finish Variance field in your OnePager Conditional Formatting Rules to show visually if your tasks are late, you’ll run into an issue: Microsoft Project treats Finish Variance as a string field instead of a number.

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Mavericks

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Did you know that you can “maverick” tasks or milestone shapes in OnePager?

This is the term we use when one or many shapes in the body of the chart have had any of their properties manually modified.

If you happen to modify one or many shapes using the capabilities in the Home tab on the Ribbon (Font, Format, Alignment, Position), or right-clicked on a shape and chosen Format to reveal the Change Task/Milestone Properties to make a change there… you have “mavericked” your shapes.

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Introducing tips on Primavera P6 and more

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Theoretically, we here at OnePager are experts on … OnePager. But, having been in the business of helping project managers present clear and eye-catching Gantt charts for many years, we have picked up a lot of tips and tricks along the way about the project and portfolio management (PPM) software that feeds data into OnePager.

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OnePager Tip: Virtual Summary Task (VST)

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There is a little-known feature in OnePager that allows you to turn several tasks into a single task…this is called the Virtual Summary Task, or “VST.”

To create a VST, simply select as many tasks as you would like to combine using your CTRL key or using a mouse-lasso. Then right click on one of the items and choose “Make into virtual summary task.”

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Removing Inactive Tasks from your OnePager Gantt Chart

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Did you know that OnePager can automatically remove inactive tasks from your report, even if you still have them flagged for import in Microsoft Project?

Let’s start with a simple Microsoft Project schedule. Notice that all five tasks are active, and all five tasks have “Flag 20” set to “Yes”:

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OnePager Goal: We Want You as a Lifetime-Customer

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In case you didn’t get the feeling at any point in your previous business exchanges with us, I’d like to tell you now: We’d like your business for as long as you live and work.

We realize this isn’t something a product alone can achieve; it’s something that we humans under the hood must commit to daily in order to earn it.

It’s something we talk about regularly during our meetings, and every now and then we get a little pat on the back from a customer who is momentarily inspired to share their appreciation for the attention we’ve given them.

No application is perfect, but our development team works hard every day (weekends too!) to make OnePager better.

Given this customer-centric focus, your feedback is enormously important to us. Negative, or positive, or even if you just have a wish list for what you want the application to do, please find a minute to send us your thoughts.

Your input drives what we do and how we do it.

Thank you!