Color background

[Kirsten]

I would like to have a color background in my Gantt Chart. And for projects
that extend over a year or more, I would love to be able to color the
background for each year separate. These charts that cover two years are
just too long for me to take in all at once. It's just this mass of long
task bars on the screen. Are they any tools to help visualize these charts
easier?
Thanks in advance,
-Kirsten

 

[John]

Kirsten,
Project is not all the great for the graphic part of the presentation
especially if you want a lot of visual options. However if you want to
separately highlight each year there are a couple of reasonable options.

The first option is to use the drawing tool to create a rectangular box
around all the tasks for each year. Select the background color from the
palette and then "send to back" so the box is behind the Gantt bars.

A second option uses a different approach and is a bit less, shall I
say, elegant. That is create separate colors for Gantt bars in each year
(Format/Barstyles). Normally Gantt bars go from Start to Finish. However
they can also be configured to go from a variable start to a variable
finish. You can't simply put a fixed beginning year date in the "From"
field and a finishing year date in the "To" field or the bars will be
solid for the whole year. Instead either manually or automatically (with
a macro) establish custom start and finish fields for each year and code
the bar color to correspond to each yearly portion of the task. For
example, a task that cross from '04 to '05 will need one bar color for
the '04 portion (e.g. from Start1 to Finish1) and another bar color for
the '05 portion (e.g. from Start2 to Finish2). One problem with this
approach is that the bar linkages will look funny for cross-year tasks.

These are a couple of methods, there may be more.

Hope this helps.
John