Project Plan with Gantt Chart and Resources Management

Important Notice


Please note that on 14th December 2023 users will experience an expected outage whilst we make upgrades to our network. We anticipate this process may take a couple of hours and so we apologise in advance for any inconvenience.

  • Dear Ozgriders, this is my first post to this forum. I have been looking for some macros to help improving my project plan, but none of the examples I found did quite exactly what I was looking for.


    As explained and illustrated in the enclosed spreadsheet, I am trying to build a project plan in Excel. My plan is becoming quite large (300 rows by 900+ columns) and heavy (>3MB). In order to keep track of the project plan (Gantt chart) and of the resources (people) I currently use "IF" formulas and conditional formatting. This works well for a small table, as shown in the enclosed example, but it becomes quite slow for a 300x900 matrix. Therefore I would like to streamline and speed-up this process by using macros.


    Can you help me and show me macros that could do the trick?
    I imagine some of you have already built similar project plans in Excel?


    Thanks a lot in advance for sharing your knowledge!
    Kind regards,


    Greg

  • Re: Project Plan with Gantt Chart and Resources Management


    Hi Gorgey,


    Welcome to Ozgrid,


    See the attached file. I believe I have managed to answer most of your "With the help of a macro" questions which I have highlighted in Green those that I believe the macro takes care of.


    Please note the following:
    1. I have inserted named ranges Date_Current and Gantt_Range, these are used by the macro so you will need to add to your working file and adjust range accordingly.
    2. The Interior Color is set by the macro based on the Interior Color of Cells in Column B.
    3. The Macro is intended to run on Sheet Named "Sheet 1 (2)" you will need to adjust the macro if you change the sheet name.


    Hope this helps you.

  • Re: Project Plan with Gantt Chart and Resources Management


    Thanks a lot Gizzmo for your quick reply and for the great help!


    Your macro is indeed answering most of my questions. If I am correct this macro does not run automatically (which may actually be nice in order to keep the file and the process as light as possible). I will then add a button to be able to manually update the Gantt chart. Would it be possible to run this macro automatically at least once, e.g. at start up or while closing the file?


    Regarding the colors, this works very well as well! The colors in the "date" table were however different to the colors in column B. I found out that replacing "Interior.ColorIndex" by "Interior.Color" ensures that colors remain unaltered. Is this the right solution?


    I will definitely apply this macro to my large 300x900 spreadsheet. I am quite sure it will dramatically reduce the size of my file and improve the overall usability.


    Thanks again for your help!


    Greg

  • Re: Project Plan with Gantt Chart and Resources Management


    Quote

    ...Would it be possible to run this macro automatically


    Can't view the workbook but you could call the macro in the Workbook_Open event of the ThisWorkBook class module. That'll update it when the workbook is opened.

  • Re: Project Plan with Gantt Chart and Resources Management


    Quote from Gorgey;727109

    Would it be possible to run this macro automatically at least once, e.g. at start up or while closing the file?


    Yes, I would do as per cytop reply. just add the following code should do it (see attached file)


    Code
    Private Sub Workbook_Open()
        Call UpDateGantt
    End Sub


    Quote from Gorgey;727109

    Regarding the colors, this works very well as well! The colors in the "date" table were however different to the colors in column B. I found out that replacing "Interior.ColorIndex" by "Interior.Color" ensures that colors remain unaltered. Is this the right solution?


    It works so it is a solution, as for if it is the right solution, I can't really say. Sorry I am not trying to be funny but I do not know enough about excel/vba to give an expert answer. Perhaps the 'experts' could give some advise.


    I am glad I was able to help out. I have attached revised file with some changes refer to Worksheet Change Event and additionaol named ranges etc to handle Adding Names to the Responsible List and set interior colors as well as amended formula to handle Total by resource

  • Re: Project Plan with Gantt Chart and Resources Management


    Hi Gizzmo,


    Thanks for the update macro! I slightly changed the code to make sure only the current date in the "date table" is colored.
    I also expanded the plan to 2 years (+/- 700 columns) and to about 80 rows to see how quickly the macro could do its magic. Unfortunately is does take some time (more than what I hoped). Is there any other trick that could be consider to speed up the update?


    (For some reason I cannot upload this new and larger project plan, sorry).


    Kind regards,


    Greg

  • Re: Project Plan with Gantt Chart and Resources Management


    Quote from Gorgey;727224

    Is there any other trick that could be consider to speed up the update?


    This is probably not the best solution but try amending Worksheet_Change to...



    This will only change/update the row in which the 'Responsible' resource has been changed.


    Howver if the Current Date is changed it will still Call the UpDateGantt macro so that the Current Date is highlighted correctly


    There is probably a more refined way to do this, perhaps try asking the rest of the Forum to either refine this code or come up with a better way. I have noticed that "jindon" has provided some better more refined solutions to some of my past posts perhaps see if he/she is willing to help.

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!