Weekend Work on an Hourly Scale

Most schedules show work that takes place during the work week, but in this article, we will explore creating a Gantt chart that displays, on an hourly scale, work done over the weekend.

Below is a schedule with tasks for Saturday and Sunday between 8:00 am and 3:00 pm.

The next step is to launch OnePager and create the chart by going to Add-ins > OnePager > New. After clicking New, you should see the “OnePager choices” window; we will select an out-of-the-box template designed for an hourly view. To do this, click Change… and then Browse, which will bring you to the template folder. Select the “Hourly View” template, and then finish creating your chart.

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Milestone Types using Project Online

If your project has lots of different milestones, you may benefit from defining a Milestone Type in Project Online so that different families of milestones are easier to distinguish.

Examples of different milestone types include major, minor, payment, and review, to name a few. In this article, we will share how to create enterprise custom fields and lookup tables in Project Online to catalog our milestone types and how to use them in your OnePager chart. 

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Percent Complete Color Coding

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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Timeline without Dates

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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Removing Inactive Tasks from your OnePager Gantt Chart

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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Tasks Showing Up as Milestones?!

When is a task not a task? If you’ve ever noticed that some of your tasks in OnePager are automatically being converted to milestones, you may have asked this question. This is due to the Task/Milestone Threshold, an advanced setting in OnePager that turns short-duration tasks into milestones, with the intent of making the Gantt chart easier to read and easier to edit.

Some people love the task/milestone threshold and others hate it. There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground. In this article, we’ll explore the task/milestone threshold and help you figure out where it should be set for your project plan. Continue reading

When is a Summary Task on the Critical Path?

Short answer: Never.

Long answer: Summary tasks are a collection of one or more child tasks. By definition, a summary task doesn’t represent any real work, resources, or deliverables, so summary tasks are neither on nor off the critical path of a project. Children of summary tasks can be on the critical path, assuming those children are not summary tasks themselves.

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Size Matters

…Well, in plan communications and Gantt charts, it does.

Size, when used as an attribute to denote meaning in data visualization, will likely force our brain to look at the largest items first. In her book “Storytelling with Data,” Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic tells us that “Relative size denotes relative importance.”

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