Quick start with online resource management
Like in most software packages, work in Ganttic is effective if you do things in certain order. Here’s a short list what you should do to set up your account and start planning your projects and resources.
First look at the user interface
When you first open Ganttic application, you’ll see a Gantt chart area what takes most of the screen and the information bar at the left.
There are two views of the Gantt chart - resource view and project view. You can switch between them using RESOURCES and PROJECTS icons.
There are also two ways to display the interface - simple and advanced (or narrow and wide). In simple display mode the left information bar contains just icons to access
resource and project view, print button, reports button and links to users and settings.
Wide sidebar includes messageboard and task and project data windows. While rescheduling taskbars in wide sidebar mode, clicking save button is not necessary if you just replace the task. If you change any data in task information window, saving is still needed.
Setting up your plan
Most important – resources and resource groups
After creating an account with Ganttic, the first step you need to take is setting up resources and resource groups. Resources are people, equipment, vehicles, facilities or anything else you need to schedule. Resource groups can be teams, divisions, departments, processes or any other common names to group your resources by. Grouping your resources is not compulsory but highly recommended as you can filter out different resource groups and customize user rights only by resource groups.
Before you can create resources you’ll have to create at least one resource group. It works quite a same way both in simple and wide/advanced display mode. First make sure that you have resource view opened and then click on the ‘ADD NEW ...’ button. Choose ‘Add new resource group’ and you’re done. New resource group will appear to the resource/groups list.
Renaming and changing the order of resources/groups
When you first open your newly created plan you’ll see some sample resources and groups. These come with the template you chose when signing up. You can rename or delete them.
To rename a resource group, please click on the small, grey icon right from the groups name:
Choose ‘Rename’ and your resource group name will be highlited. Type in new name and hit enter key. Same little menu allows you to rearrange resource groups by clicking on ‘Move up’ and ‘Move down’. Adding new resources is also done from here.
Renaming resources is even easier. Just click on the resource name and your resource group name will be highlited. Type in new name and hit enter key.
Adding and modifying new users
Adding new users can be done by accessing user area from bottom-left corner of screen.
But there is also a quicker way. Just click on the ‘ADD NEW ...
’ button in the upper left corner and choose ‘Add new user’ from the pop-up menu.
Setting user rights
There are 3 types of user rights in Ganttic:
- Administrator. Has all the rights to create, modify or delete anything
- Limited user. Can’t add, modify or add other users. Modifying own user data such as name, password, contact data is still possible. Administrator can set user rights for limited users by resource groups (see the screenshot below). Administrator can also grant limited user to manage projects
- Viewer. This guy has nearly no rights. All he can do is see other peoples work and print out reports.
Making yourself comfortable
As explained earlier, most important part of setting up your plan is resources, resource groups and users. But this is not all. There are more options to make Ganttic fit your organizations planning and scheduling needs. You can set up custom data filelds, choose a default timerange and coloring options for taskbars.
You’ll have some preconfigured data such as custom data fields for tasks and projects, sample resource groups and resources and sample tasks and projects. Feel free to modify them. Here’s how.
Setting up custom data fields
Custom data fields are useful for recording any data related to your projects and tasks. There are 6 types of data fields: text, number, date, link, user, list and URL. So, for example, you can create for project ‘Notes’ (text), ‘Manager’ (user), ‘Cost’ (number), ‘Status’ (list), Budget (URL to external site or document) etc. But why not also ‘Mileage’ , ‘Estimated hours’ , ‘Customer name’ , ‘Department’ , ‘Location’ and so on. Later, when you have filled your custom data fields for a while, you can get them grouped and summed in reports. Great way of making work plan and budget at the same time.
You can access the custom fields settings 1) from simple display mode - when opening task or project pop-up, there’s a link ‘ADD/EDIT FIELDS’ ) from wide display mode - on both task and project windows there is a small menu icon 
Click on it and choose ‘Add/edit fields’ 3) Go to SETTINGS area. There are links ‘ADD/EDIT TASK FIELDS’ and ‘ADD/EDIT PROJECT FIELDS’. Choose the one you want to use.
Custom field types
Custom data fields is one of the most useful features in Ganttic. To really unlock their power we recommend to take some time for thinking what set of data fields work best for your business. Hit and miss method works also well - create as many data fields as you can imagine and after some time of active using delete the ones you think are not offering enough value in planning process and further analysis.
Following a brief description of data field types and examples what to use them for.
Text fields
You can use them for entering text as notes, names, addresses, contact data etc.
Number fields
Number fields are for amounts, cost, budget etc. Reports will calculate subtotals on number fields
Date fields
Date fields are for milestones and deadlines. When you create a date field for projects, you’ll have an option to determine if you want the deadline/milestone to appear in project view and in which color.
List fields
List type of data field allows to choose a predefined value such as status, department, kind, product, color etc. Each list value can have different color and the whole plan can be colored by list values. Example - you are scheduling production lines making four different products. Create two list type of fields under Task Fields setup: 1) Product ( list values: Pr1, Pr2, Pr3, Pr4) and 2) Status (list values: Planned, In Progress, Completed). Now you can color code your plan by switching coloring option from filter box
Link fields
Link type of fields are good for attaching an URL to project or task. You can point the URL to an external web page, document in your corporate server or Google Docs. So it is easy to attach budgets, lists or any other information sources to a project or task. NB! Please do not forget the “http:// or https:// or ftp://” prefix.
User fields
User type field lets you to assign different roles to projects and tasks. You can create fields as Supervisor, Responsible, Assigned to ... etc. User type field lets you to choose one of the Ganttic users from your account.
Set snap options
Snap is a feature helping you to draw and move taskbars more exactly. Go to Settings>Snap settings and choose a default task start and interval. After you have set those, when drawing a new taskbar your cursor will automatically snap to chosen start time and move on with 1;2;3;4;6;8;12;24 hour increments.
Set default view and timeline
Different users might have different needs inside the same plan. Production manager wants to see the present state and few weeks ahead in future, analyst might be interested in last month only.
You can set a default visible timerange for your plan. Go to Settings>Personal settings and choose the default timerange. Those settings affect only your account. Other users in your plan will see their defaults.
Working in Ganttic
Now, when your plan is all set, it is time to do some work in it.
Create new tasks
There are two ways of adding new tasks. Easiest is to move your cursor on the plan area in the desired resource row and click on the start time of your task. Then, holding down of your left mouse button, drag the cursor from left to right until reaching to the end time of your task. Then release the mouse button. Pop-up window will appear. There you can choose a project from drop down menu (typing some letters from your projects name will narrow the search) and fine tune the start and end time.
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