Friday 10 September 2010

Gantt Charts

The below recently appeared on the Alteryx forum:

Hi,
I have a an Alteryx module that reports project data and milestones for various projects. What is missing is a visual representation of the milestones and I was wondering if anyone had used the Alteryx reporting tools to create a Gantt Chart type view of milestones/tasks.
Thanks,
Gavin

Hello Gavin,

We do not currently offer a Gantt Chart option in the Chart tool. Thank you for expressing an interest in this feature, we will look into it as a possibility for the future.

-Brett

While Brett's reply is quite correct; there is nothing to stop you creating your own Gantt Chart using the tools currently available in Alteryx 5.0.  If anyone remembers the techniques which were used to create a polar graph or a chess board which used the mapping tool as a custom renderer, then a similar technique could be used to create a Gantt chart.

So I've put together a sample module which shows a possible method for doing this. Which produces the below:


From the following data table:


The module uses a couple of interesting techinques including using the Generate Rows tool to create a data row for every day between two date ranges and generating the spatial objects needed to build up the Gantt charts by dynamically creating json objects (Thanks Ned).

The module looks like this:


and can be downloaded from here:


The things that need doing next with this are to take a look at the scaling aspect (it currently doesn't look so good for timeframes longer than a month) and turn the whole thing into a macro which outputs a report .

As always any questions/comments please post below or feel free to contact me directly.