Gantt Chart (Horizon View)

Is there a Gantt Chart in DayBack Calendar?

DayBack's "Horizon" view is our version of a Gantt chart and it lets you look at an entire project at a glance, as opposed to just one-month or one-week at a time. And of course, it will respect your filters so you can see just one project (filtering for that project) or perhaps just one resource across multiple projects (filtering for that resource).

Importantly, Horizon view lets you work at long time scales, so deadlines don't sneak up on you.

We’re calling this the “horizon” view because it lets you can out past the current week or month to longer time ranges. I also like this term as opposed to “Gantt chart” since this will probably be missing a few things normally found in Gantt charts–at least in this first version. The current release doesn't have dependencies, for example, or horizontal “bands” in the chart for each role or phase.

We’ll be adding some of that stuff in subsequent builds but we also recognize that “real” Gantt chart apps are too complicated for most projects–we want something that gets at the relationships between events–and lets you see everything at a glance–without lots of junk to slow you down.

Long Timescales

Horizon view can show as few as seven days, and as many as several dozen centuries. 

At long timescales, you may wish to filter the calendar more tightly so that you don't see too many events. Fortunately, DayBack hides repeating events on Horizon view by default, but you can turn that off. The options available for hiding repetitions depend on which kinds of calendars you have active. For Salesforce, it's just a single option to show or hide repeating events:

For Google Calendar, DayBack will automatically hide different frequency of repetitions as your time scale gets longer. Details are here: Repeating Events on Horizon View.

Progress Bars

Show the percent complete for each of your tasks with progress bars. Bars can compare two fields as shown in this example, comparing forecast and actual hours. Learn more about progress bars on Horizon view. You can also add progress bars to the event's popover or to enhanced tooltips so you can see them on any view. 

Creating & Editing Events

Create new events by double-clicking in any open space on the calendar:

You can also create new events by double-clicking on the plus sign in the lower right, which will make a new event for the day you're focussed on. To make a new event on a specific date or time slot, drag the plus sign to any cell in the calendar:

Finally, edit events by dragging the event to a new cell or dragging the end of the event to change its duration:

Breakout & Analytics

Breakout by Any Field

You can group events on the horizon view by selecting "Breakout by" from the Horizon menu. This creates a row for each resource or status in your filter set and lets you drag events between resources (to balance your schedule) or between statuses (to mark things done). See breakout in action.

In addition to resources and statuses, select "More" to break out your schedule by any field, including custom fields. 

When using the "More" option to breakout by any field, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• The fields you see on the "Breakout By Field" selector include fields from any visible calendars.
• You're seeing the field "labels" and data is summarized according to its field label, irrespective of the actual field name under the hood. So two calendars, with different actual field names in different Salesforce objects, could both have a field label of "Project Type" and DayBack would treat them as the same field, combining any matching values from those two calendars.
• Conversely, if two calendars both have a "location" field, but one is labeled "Place" and the other is labeled "Location", DayBack will treat them as separate fields on breakout.
• More info and a short video of breakout in action here: Breakout by Resource – balancing your workload.

Analytics (Charting)

Turn on analytics to measure your schedule. Combined with breakout, analytics provide subtotal across any field in your calendar.

Learn more about analytics and charting here: Calendar Analytics.

Shortcuts

Shift-click on the arrows on either side of "today" to move horizon view forward or backward by just one column. Usually, clicking on these arrows moves the calendar by the whole date range: so if you're looking at a 45-day range and click the right-hand arrow, you'll navigate 45 days further into the future. But clicking with the shift-key down will navigate you just a single day forward. (This shortcut also works on most multi-day resource scheduling views in the Resources tab.)

Option-drag events to duplicate them: this is ideal for sketching out a project. (On Windows, hold down the At key while dragging in order to duplicate events.) This works on all views in DayBack Calendar, not just on Horizon view. =)

Other Multi-Day Views in DayBack

In addition to the Horizon view, there are a couple of other capabilities that may help you look at your schedule across multiple days. DayBack has multi-day resources scheduling which lets people look for gaps across multiple dates (up to 14 days at a time).

The other feature that can help balance your workload is the "grid view" which is like a pivoted version of the multi-day resource view: 

Both of these views are described in DayBack's Resource scheduling overview here.