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Submitted by davet on 2011/04/06 16:40

Displayed columns wipes out custom column captions.
Most menu item titles are in the form action verb then object...so Displayed columns is inconsistent.
TaskActStart and TaskActEnd are confusing titles.

See video: /drupal5/files/351/Column problems(1).swf

Dave

Comments

Hi Dave

Fixed in v0.9.25P3
Changed to Add / Remove Columns...
The "Act" part, stands for Actual, as opposed to "Plan", as it is planned to support both Actual and Planned bars

Pierre,

Thanks for P3...that works Great!!

Regarding the TaskActStart and TaskActEnd...MS Project uses two sets of fields for planned and actual data (see note below). However, Actual Start and Actual Finish are only useful for tracking against a baseline plan to show whether a project is ahead of schedule or slipping.

I agree that you only need one set of fields for Start and End. But since you are not implementing baseline tracking at this time, the user will never actually use the terms Actual Start and Actual Finish. Because of this, I suggest you drop the ACT in the field names and just say TaskStart and TaskEnd. I think this would simplify things and reduce confusion.

Note:

There is Start, Finish, Duration, and Work (think of these as the scheduled
values) and then there is Actual Start, Actual Finish, Actual Duration, and
Actual Work. These are two separate sets of fields in the database. You
see the first set when viewing the Entry table and the second set when
viewing the Tracking table, among other places. There is also a third set
of fields, the Baseline Start, Baseline Finish, Baseline Duration, and
Baseline Work fields. When you save a baseline, the data in the scheduled
Start, Finish, etc fields is copied into the corresponding baseline fields.

Clipped from: http://forums.techarena.in/microsoft-project/1158705.htm On: 4/6/2011 9:32:47 PM By: Dave Thompson

Dave

Thanks Dave for this information. Your expertise in MSProject will definitely come in handy.

Fields can be renamed at will, so feel free to remove the "Act" part, which I'll most likely do in the sample IQBase.

BTW, I see that Project has both Predecessors AND Successors. Any reason why ? Could one use only Successors (i.e. NextTasks in IQ) ?

Pierre,

I think you could use only Successors without Predecessors. You could always add Predecessors later if needed. I thought of using Successors in conjunction with NextTasks after I made the recommendation to add Predecessors in Gantt chart problems in version P. I added the Successor column to the screen capture here in order to look at that possibility.

I think I must have gotten kind of dyslexic when comparing the IQ Gantt chart to MS Project Gantt because the numbers are off by one when you compare NextTask ID in IQ to Successor in MS Project. I think that is why I thought you needed to create a Predecessor. However, I just went back and compared Next ID to Successors again (see screen capture below), and now I see why the NextTask ID in IQ is off by one number. The reason is MS Project assigns a Task ID to the Summary task where as you don't do that in IQ.

So, the bottom line is I think you could use NextTask ID as the Successor and forget about the Predecessor. However, you might consider making your Task ID work like the one in MS Project so that later if you write import and export transformations to MS project everything lines up one for one.

Dave

Dave

>However, you might consider making your Task ID work like the one in MS Project so that later if you write import and export transformations to MS project everything lines up one for one

Thanks for the info Dave. However, that would not be possible because of the multi-purpose aspect of IQ. NextTaskIDs must be unique throughout the file and items in your Gantt may be used elsewhere in your IQBase.

Have a great day !

Pierre