Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Because Printing a Project is Important

We've just added basic printing support to our cadre of online project tools. Simple and effective, this lets you print exactly what you see on the screen. Look for the 'Print' image on the left-hand side of the Gantt Chart.

Clicking on this image button will bring up the print feature supported by the web browser. In this example, we are using Firefox. Chrome also works. We are using HTML5 to do the printing so other browsers will support it soon if not already. The print dialog reflects what's available in the underlying UI. You can select the printer and change settings just as you normally would.

In this example I'm actually going to click on the 'Properties' button and change the layout from portrait to landscape in order to see more of the timeline. You can fullsize the web page before printing to fit more pixels onto the paper. You can also adjust the IntelliGantt sliders at the bottom right to compress the timeline and the vertical separation of your tasks. The result is the task list and gantt chart printed out as you would expect..

This particular image was pulled from the native Microsoft Windows XPS format. A little easier than linking to a piece of paper in the office.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Adding Colors to Tasks and their Children

For all the folks who have been asking about how to change the colors of tasks in IntelliGantt, and there have been many of you, I have good news-- you can now change the color of any task in IntelliGantt! We also went a step further and added a toggle so that if you want that color to apply to all the sub tasks as well you just click a checkbox. Finally, if a sub task inherits a color from a parent task but you really want it to be purple, you can do that too. Let's take a look.

Here's a project within IntelliGantt for Basecamp using the default colors-- green for tasks that are completed or are ahead of the timeline and red for tasks that are not completed and behind the timeline. To change the color of a task first select it (in this case we have selected the task 'Fifth List') and click the '+' button on the left-side.

This brings up our new and improved palette of add options. This picture shows what it will look like the first time you click the '+'-- it will have the 'Add Task' option pre-selected for you. Hopefully it makes sense that to change colors you click on the four 'colors' image. A little underline under each image also tells you what is active at the moment.

Once the task and the color palette have been selected a color chooser pops up. By default it will be FFFFFF, which we are treating as 'use the default color'. You can change this by clicking anywhere on the color map. You can also change the luminosity with the vertical slider just to the right of the color map. As you make changes you will see the new hexcode in the edit box and the chosen color applied to the task.

If you would like to apply the same spiffy color to all of the select tasks sub tasks, we have the 'Give children the same color' checkbox for you. This can be overridden at the child task level by directly setting its color. If the child is just using the default color, then it inherits the parents color.

And that's it. Simply click the checkmark button to accept the changes or the X button to cancel and revert to the previous color scheme.

Once you accept or cancel the changes you go back to the palette options. You can either exit this palette by clicking the X at the top (highlighted in red) or choose another palette tool to work with. In this case, since the post is about colors, we will select the color palette and reset things back to the default scheme.

To reset the color scheme of the selected task back to the defaults, simply click the 'Reset' button. Or you can type FFFFFF back into the hexcode edit box.

Accept changes when you're ready, or if you change your mind later you can always click 'Undo'.

The color chooser feature is available in IntelliGantt for Basecamp, IntelliGantt for Google and IntelliGantt for Everyone. Coming soon, fun with columns!