I apologise for what is going to be a messy post, but I am under pressure of time at the moment and cannot quickly improve  on the quality of what follows. I hope that forum users will nevertheless find the post interesting and of value.

I learnt a number of things in conversation with Pierre today when we sought to address the issues of project planning.

The first is that the next task actions are only associated with the setting of the Done field. They do not constitute a more general way of an action at time n taking into account what happened at time n -1. They are not therefore particularly useful in the context of planning.They are for example useful in the context of monitoring a project plan.

Secondly, there are a number of new functionalities associated with Gantt charts which have been introduced in release 0.9.26 pre-rel 53. Notably, these include the introduction of the identification of a critical path. See below for more details.

Thirdly, and crucially in practical terms: InfoQube uses an HCI innovation which Pierre assures me exists in later versions of Microsoft Office and indeed in Windows 7. Thus for example at: Split Button, we find that: “The Split Button is a composite control with which the user can select a default value bound to a primary button, or select from a list of mutually exclusive values displayed in a drop-down list bound to a secondary button”.

Specifically in the context of task management, the lines which indicate task dependencies are only visible if the primary Task Links button is toggled on:

To the right in the split control, we find:

Thus we have a primary button and a secondary sub- menu.

Note also that Gantt facilities are selected in at least two places. One is an overall Gantt chart properties for a specific file which is set in the manage grids dialogue. See http://www.sqlnotes.net/drupal5/index.php?q=node/898. The other of course is the Gantt view. One place where this is documented is in my own InfoQube book page, as yet very incomplete, which is to be found at: http://www.sqlnotes.net/drupal5/index.php?q=node/1852.

There are therefore a number of ways in which to introduce tasks and to link them, that is, to show that one is dependent on another. These are only effective if appropriate choices have been made in the overall settings for Gantt controls.

We note here that the current release, 0.9.26 pre-release 53, introduced:

· New: Gantt: Link bars command button. Select 2 bars and click to define the link between the two. Alternatively, Shift and click on the first bar and drag to the second bar.