I am using GanttProject to plan my vegetable garden for the spring through fall months. I have each vegetable defined as a task, and the row is defined as a resource. I can see the timeline view of resource allocation, but I would also like to see a physical layout view. In my case, the garden is divided into a simple grid, M row by N columns. I would like to be able to see the grid layout populated by the name of the vegetable that is allocated to occupy that space. A simple timeline slider would let me visualize how the garden is occupied throughout the season.
How much work would be involved in adding this feature? Is this something I could add to my version of GanttProject with some basic coding skills?
I can’t say that I clearly understand this feature from UI perspective, but anyway, in my opinion GanttProject is not the right tool for such sort of tasks. I am sure that Excel will do much better job, e.g. by just copying the whole layout to sheets corresponding to months.
Thanks for the reply. I have used Excel in the past, but the manual copy>paste workflow from GanttProject to Excel breaks the dynamic link, and makes it hard to manage updates. My idea would be to update the layout view when resources or durations are changed in GanttProject. If I find some time to develop this myself, how do I get the source code to modify?
Just an idea, but what about having each row in the vegetable garden represented by a task named ROW x. Each row could be the length of the growing season by adding a start and end marker as 1 day sub tasks (sub task 1 and sub task 3) - this would give you a physical layout view in the gantt chart view. You could then add a middle sub task to each row called for example ‘CARROTS’ (sub task 2). You could even separate CARROTS into a number of sub tasks, say ‘SOW’ & ‘HARVEST’ if you wanted. You could colour code the actual vegetable sub tasks so that they stand out and leave the row tasks and start and end sub tasks a pale grey so that they didn’t detract from your visual layout that you want to see. The end result would show all your rows going across the page with your vegetables as colourful sub tasks going across the page according to when they need to be in the ground, with as much or as little detail as you wanted.
Thanks Hector. That’s similar to what I have already. Each vegetable is a task, and the row is a resource. The problem is that my rows are subdivided into beds, so I have Rows A,B,C, and Beds 1,2,3. So it’s a simple grid, but the GanttProject time views just show a single dimension. I want to visualize the 9-cell grid: A1,A2,A3,B1,…with a time slider that fills in the appropriate vegetable in each grid cell throughout the season, based on my resource allocation.
If I choose to do this in Excel, is there a way for me to export data from GanttProject, that I could read back into Excel to create my grid view?