Finding SharePoint Tasks

IntelliGantt for SharePoint has powerful search tools you can use to quickly find important tasks based on any available column. You can search Text or Numeric (ie. Number, Currency, Percentage, Date and Duration) columns using operators appropriate for the column type. For example, you can search text with 'contains' or search numers with '>'.

You can also pass in the find parameters as a query string to the IntelliGantt url so that important searches can be created ad hoc and shared real time to people.

But let's start with the basics, first. The Find tool is located in the upper-right of IntelliGantt for SharePoint. By default 'All Columns' is selected with 'Contains' as the operator and an empty string for the value. This means every task is shown within IntelliGantt for SharePoint.

'All Columns' uses a text based approach to finding values, so you will see the text based operators available-- Contains, Starts With, Ends with and Matches.

When you type in more than two characters in the Find Value text box, IntelliGantt immediately performs the find action and updates the displayable list of tasks, both in the grid and the gantt. Because this is the 'All Columns' field, every column value for each task is searched to match this value. Numeric fields in this case are treated as strings for the matching.

Dates are supported as a Numeric type to search by. For example, if you select the 'Due Date' column, you can then use numeric operations like '<' or '>' to find dates in the past or the future, depending on your requirement. Pay special attention to the date format when searching with date columns. IntelliGantt lets you choose the date format via the configuration tool. The date you enter into the 'Find Value' must match the selected format.

Purely numeric fields like 'Cost' work as you'd expect, except as just number values. No need to prepend a Cost with the currency symbol. Note in the picture below that the 'Show in Gantt' selection is 'Cost', but we see a 'More Tasks' for task item 2. This is because 'More Tasks' is a Task List that lacks a Cost column name.

Finally, you can pass any column name, operator and value into IntelliGantt for SharePoint by specifying them on the url as a query string.

activeFindName -- defines the column name to use

activeFindOp -- defines the operator to use

activeFindValue -- defines the value to use

Text Operator query string options

• contains -- text containing the find value
• startswith -- text that starts with the find value
• endswith -- text that ends with the find value
• matches -- text that completely matches the find value

Numeric Operator query string options

• gt -- greater than
• gte -- greater than or equal
• lt -- less than
• lte -- less than or equal
• eq -- equal

Some examples

• ?activeFindName=AllColumns&activeFindOp=contains&activeFindValue=Hello
• ?activeFindName=DueDate&activeFindOp=gt&activeFindValue=11/11/2015
• ?activeFindName=Duration&activeFindOp=gt&activeFindValue=2d

Adding Fields to your Projects

We just pushed out a new feature for our online gantt software that lets you create new fields in your projects. Right now we support text fields, numbers (including currency and percentages), dates, flags and choices. The new fields you create are available for every project and for every user you are collaborating with. You can also display these new columns within the gantt chart, search for values within these columns, print them and even download all the data. In short, we've made IntelliGantt extremely customizable for your project needs. Hopefully we've made it simple to use as well. Here's how it works.

Here is a basic project we've been using in our demos with the standard field layout.

If you move the mouse into any column header or select a column by tapping on it with your finger, you will see the 'cog' and '+' images appear.

The cog lets you configure the existing column. The + lets you create a new column. In this case we will click the +.

Notice that the task list grid now shows a 'New Column' header where we clicked the + sign. Also, a new window appears that lets you configure the new column. This is actually what you see if you had just clicked on the cog. When you clicked on the + it created the new column first and then brought up its editor. With this you can configure the 'Column Name' and the 'Display Name'. These are different because we anticipate you may wish to work with the data later and 'Column Name' can be something machines can use to reference data while 'Display Name' is more human friendly. Let's change both to be 'Extra'.

With the new Extra field we can enter values with in-place editing just like any other field. These values are now part of the project and visible/editable by any other IntelliGantt user.

You can go back to the field configuration at any time by clicking on the cog again. These custom fields are extremely flexible. You can change not only the column name and display name but also what type of data they display as well.

For example, another very useful type of field is 'Selection'. This lets you create a selectable list of values for IntelliGantt users, reducs the chance of data entry errors and thereby improve the 'Smart Search' results. You could always create another column with the field type you want, but here we will simply change it to 'Selection' and type in our values. We enter a 'blank' first line so that users have the option to blank out a cell.

Now instead of a text edit field we get a dropdown from which users can select the values we entered. Since we marked the field type as 'Selection', we can only select a single value. If we had chosen the 'Selections' field type, then the in-place editor would change to support multiple selections.

If you are an IntelliGantt for Basecamp user, then other IntelliGantt for Basecamp users will see the columns you create and you will see the columns your colleagues create. Team members just using Basecamp, however, will not see these new fields. Therefore this lets project managers track additional information important to the project but superfluous to others.

If you are an IntelliGantt for Google user, then other IntelliGantt for Google users will also see the columns you create and you will see the columns your colleagues create. Team members who use the IntelliGantt Task List will not automatically see them. You can control which fields are visible and editable for team members. As this picture shows, the IntelliGantt for Google configuration window has extra checkbox fields for these options.