Free Cloud Based Project Management Gantt Tool Gantter.com

I had to create a Gantt chart, and once again I didn't have Microsoft Project.

I so rarely create Gantt charts that I haven't had MS Project installed for a few years.

After a quick look around at the open source project management tool space, there didn't appear to be many new tools. And those that did exist didn't appear to have been updated recently.

But Gantter.com caught my eye.

I chose to use the "For Google Drive" edition, since I could log in with my google account and save the files to my Google Drive.

Initial Steps:

1. visit gantter.com
2. click on the "gantter editions" link
3. click [Start Now] for the "For Google Drive"
4. allow Google to authenticate and use Gantter.com
5. start creating your project plan

 Either click on "Untitled" or use "Project \ Properties" to set the Name of the project. Save that.

Then immediately click on "Autosave : OFF" to turn on Autosave, and then you are free to experiment.

A few Lessons Learned:

The tool is pretty simple to use so if you know Gantt charts, you'll be fine. Just a few lessons learned.

• Set the View to show "Work" and use the "Work" field to define the duration of the tasks, this way when you add resources it will calculate the duration correctly
• Use the description field so you know why you added certain work values
• "Make a copy" before you do any major edits - just in case
• I had best results with resource/work calculation by setting the "Advanced" type to "Fixed Work" "Effort Driven"

For a free tool this is great, it met my needs. Some great features:

• Import from MS Project
• Free
• Google Drive Integration
• Export To MS Project
• Simple to use

The printing is based on the view that you can see, so make sure you configure the view and size all the columns the way you want them to print.


I found that printing to png worked better than pdf because then I could control the paging when printing more easily.

The Gantter site has some videos showing how to use an older version of the software, but these are still useful for getting you up to speed.

http://gantter.com/help/videos/

 

The Blog has an RSS feed. I susbscribed to that, to keep up to date with the tool

 

http://gantter.com/blog/