Introduction

For planning purposes, it works best if you can have an eye on resource utilization across the project portfolio. That’s why when planning resources for a project in a single project view, you see the tasks that aren’t connected to that specific project. The tasks are on the background to let you know the resource is already booked.

That gives you the control to decide if you are going to change the schedule or find another resource with the same skills. However, when it comes to getting an actual overview, the grey taskbars that were your best friends just a few minutes ago, are now in the way of having a clear picture of what’s going on. Similarly, the gray taskbars are the reason why you cannot simply take a screenshot of the schedule and add it to the presentation you are preparing for the client or other stakeholders.

To solve this problem and to give you yet another tool for creating a better overview, you can choose if the grey taskbars (i.e. placeholders) are displayed or not. In case of single project views, you can choose if you want to view all resources, or just the ones in use. Additional visibility settings for utilization and resource availability are included. This includes both custom and project views. 

Must-know about this feature

You can select if the taskbars that aren’t meeting the filter criteria or aren’t a part of the specific project are displayed or not. You can also choose the option to display the Gantt chart but not the data on the Gantt chart. In addition to a clearer overview, this feature creates a possibility to view the resource utilization in the specific view. If you choose to hide the placeholders altogether, the resource utilization will be recalculated. In addition, you can choose which resource availability information to display (utilization %, available time, busy time) and if you want to see the utilization graphs for resources and/or resource groups for this particular view. These settings are view-specific, not general. 

Apply visibility settings

1. Click the 'Resource visibility' icon on the right of the view panel
This will open various visibility options.





2. Choose chart row height
The 'Compact' option will make the task-bars and the resource title cell more tight. A reload is needed to see apply this setting.



To see the data of archived projects make sure to enable 'Show archived projects' option.
 




3. Enable or disable 'Unassigned tasks' section 
Disabling it will hide the section from the chart.





4. Enable or disable task dependency lines
This setting is available only if the feature itself is enabled from Settings > Dependencies.





5. Choose placeholders´ visibility
   
'Show placeholders with data' is applied by default. You can see irrelevant resources and greyed out tasks (placeholders) with information. Choose other options to hide the information (Show placeholders) or the placeholders completely (Hide placeholders).  



 




6. Choose resource availability option
You can decide which availability information to display. 



'Show utilization %'  option will display resource's load for visible time period in percentages.



'Show available time' option will display resource's available hours for visible time period.



'Show busy time' option will display resource's scheduled hours for visible time period. 



'Hide' option will hide all the availability information entirely. 



7. Enable or disable resource utilization graphs and/or resource group utilization graphs 

'Show resource utilization graphs' enabled will look like this (notice the green line and the utilization figure above the task-bars): 

'Show resource group utilization graph' enabled will look like this: 

To apply any of the visibility parameters to the view permanently make sure to save them to the view.