Sunday, November 23, 2008

What's new in GP "Loire" M3: dashboards

A few months ago Joanna Muras from Ireland started working on GanttProject, and her work resulted into the most significant feature of the third milestone: task dashboards.

Routine operations are bothering. We don't want to search manually for overdue tasks in a big project or to separate high priority tasks from low priority ones. We do want software to do it for us.

Now there are Dashboards in GanttProject. They sit in the top right corner and do the routine job



Currently there are three dashboards. Priority dashboard just groups tasks by priority. Today's agenda shows you only those tasks which are supposed to be completed today. Overdue tasks looks for tasks which were supposed to be finished in the past but have not been marked as "completed". Besides, it also shows tasks with end date today, tomorrow and in the near future (you may setup the look-ahead days count in the dashboard settings).

Every dashboard lets you open task properties directly from the dashboard window, but some of them provide even more convenient ways of fixing the most typical operations. When you see some task which is overdue just because you forgot to set its completion percentage to 100%, you'll probably want to complete it. Dashboard can do it with just two clicks. Tasks which are marked with a light bulb have auto fixes, which appear in the context menu. You can mark overdue tasks as completed or reschedule to tomorrow a task which is due today.