SharePoint Gantt View: adjusting the scale

One of the terrific list features in SharePoint v3 (i.e. WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007) is the Gantt View.

It’s available by default in a Project Tasks list or you can add a Gantt view to an existing list.

For further information, have a look at Microsoft Office Online: Create and manage a project task list

While this feature is not intended as an alternative to project scheduling tools such as MS-Project, for many projects/project teams, it provides a more than adequate means of defining/presenting/sharing/managing the project plan.

However, out-of-the-box it does have a couple of limitations including:

• it doesn’t support task dependencies or linking
• grouping of tasks (i.e. as sub-tasks) isn’t available
• the timescale isn’t adjustable (by either user or administrator) and the default view is in weeks. For projects spanning months, this can be a nuisance.

On a recent project, I was looking for a means to adjust the project timescale. After much searching and for the most part being told that it couldn’t be done (at least not without significant coding effort), I found this blog post by Christophe at Path to SharePoint How to scale down the SharePoint Gantt view. It’s a simple, quick and flexible solution and only requires you to:

1. Edit the page with the Gantt View and insert a Content Editor Web Part
2. Modify the Content Editor Web Part and using the Source Editor, insert the CSS code provided.
3. Hide the Content Editor Web Part and Save the page.

Of course, hopefully Microsoft will see fit to provide this out-of-the-box in the next release?