Gantt Chart Snapshots Users - Your Feedback Needed ❗️

Hi everyone!

For those of you who don’t know me yet, I’m Ilia, a Product Manager at Wrike 👋

We’ve chatted, discussed your feedback, and tested some features together with some of you here before 🙌 And today, I’m looking to gather your feedback on Gantt Chart snapshots!

My team and I are thinking about working on a new version of snapshots that will also allow us to experiment with the Gantt Chart in combination with the New Table view. But first, we’d like to validate this idea with you, and for that, we really need your feedback.

If you use Gantt Chart snapshots a lot, and especially if you use external snapshots, please let us know below how you are using them and for what purpose, as well as how you may like to use them.

A common use case here would be if you are using the snapshots to send to your clients for a current project status view.

If you share your feedback, I may reach out to you separately to discuss it in more detail.

Looking forward to your input and thank you for your help!

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Comments

Anders Kilbrandt

I use it when planning a project to schedule deadlines and milestones. It's great to be able to send these to the client. An easy and professional way to show the planing of things.

Carol Beasley

We use to have as reference of what the baseline schedule was and what it is now. It would be helpful to be able to see the baseline date and the current date in one view and choose which baseline dates to display. i.e. baseline dates on 1/1/2022 as compared to now, baseline dates on 4/1/2022 as compared to now and what specific task to display, such as just the milestones.

Nathan Jones

We primarily snapshots when sharing project updates with clients / non-Wrike users. They are very handy to link to from emails or a SharePoint page with additional project details (slides, overview, etc.). That said, I do find it a bit of a maintenance chore to always generate new ones each week. And I usually mess it up the first few times and have to go back and hide/display certain columns. Would be great if there were other ways to configure and auto-update. The external view of calendars is set-it-and-forget-it so those work fantastic for us.

Ben Thomas

Our team uses snapshots all the time to give clients a timeline. We created a custom field called "client project milestone" that only shows client facing tasks of our larger project and are able to take a snapshot of that. We like this feature because it's less static than the PDF export for clients and you can look at previous snapshots to see how the timeline has changed over time. I would say if there's going to be new capabilities rolled out/experimentation, just to make sure you keep the ability to give clients a timeline deliverable.

A feature with snapshots I'd like to see is if we could automatically generate and send snapshots to clients like a report.

Angela Kennewell

For us, it would be really great to be able to select more specifically what is shared in the snapshot with a simple tick-box menu or similar.

We often have gantt chart view with a LOT of detailed task and sub-task information below the milestones and top level task/project stage durations, but client does not need to see all of this (nor do we want to share).

Being able to fine-tune exactly what is and is not included in the snaphot with a few quick and simple check-box style clicks would be very valuable to us.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Great feedback, huge thanks for sharing, everyone! 🙌

Dan Bowden

I agree with a lot of what was said above. I share snapshots of Gantt charts with some of my clients as progress updates each week, and also wish that it was easier to manipulate what information is shared in the snapshots. One issue I've had is that often the due date that we want to share with the client is different than the deadline we schedule internally... part of the whole underpromise and overdeliver thing as I'd rather get things to them 'early' or 'on time' than late.

The workaround that I've used for doing this is adding a subtask with the client deadline (usually called 'send' or something) for each task in projects I'd like to share with my clients, and then setting the due date of that sub task to the date I'd like to share with the client. Unlike the custom field option that Ben Thomas mentioned above, this makes the bar on the Gantt Chart line up with the client due date so long as the subtask is collapsed under the main task. Since the live functionality would allow the client to expand that task and see two separate due dates, I generally end up sending screenshots of the Gantt chart with those tasks collapsed.

It would be helpful for me if I could create a custom Delivery Date field that could be used in the way the 'Due Date' field is used in the current deadline to stretch the progress bar on the Gantt Chart. That way I could use a clean Gantt Chart that illustrates Start Date and Due Date internally, and share a clean Gantt chart that illustrates Start Date and Delivery Date externally. It would also make it easier to set these tasks up in table view.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks a lot for such detailed feedback @Dan Bowden, and welcome to the Community 👋

Jason Pontius

Some of the feedback here goes back to the issue of not having real Gantt chart reports. If we could generate a real report like in other apps (MS Project), we wouldn't need to jump through these hoops to provide the information we want to give to our clients. We wouldn't have to take screenshots. We wouldn't have to find workarounds to hide data.

One thing that I noticed when trying to share snapshots of Gantt charts was that you can't share the baseline comparison. I wanted to share the Gantt chart with an external colleague from a partner company in order to track the offset between baseline snapthos and current schedule. This is not possible. What good is sharing the snapshots if you don't have a way of comparing it (baseline) to the current schedule? This should be an option.

Thank you.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback @Jason Pontius, I've now sent it to Ilia and his Product team who owns Gantt Chart snapshots and is doing the research at the moment 🙂

Florian Marten

We use Snapshots less often than PDF exports.

One major point for not using snapshots is, that external users might not understand that they have to open all main tasks to see their sub tasks. The PDF Export is a better way to show exactly the things you want to share.

Having all lines expanded might be too much in larger snapshots, but if you have filtered down to maybe 4-8 main tasks, it would benefitial to see the sub tasks as well.

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Thanks for sharing your feedback @Florian Marten, I'll now share it with the team responsible for Gantt Charts 👍

Piyush Menon

Adding to the list of feedback above, this should be a minor one to fix but important.

- The Gantt chart snapshots for external sharing does not show the weekends as greyed out. This should be the same view as you see in Gantt with weekend greyed out.

Gannt chart export to PDF

This works as replacmement to above but the alignment of columns for task infromation and other columsn does not auto fit. It seems like you need to adjust manually this before you export.

There is also no today line indicator in the exported graph!

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hey @Piyush Menon, we appreciate your feedback, thanks for sharing it! 🙌

Jeffrey Bond

We developed a custom column which is just a checkbox titled Key Milestone. The reason for this is to facilitate a simplified gantt chart that does not show all the tasks but rather the selected start/finish, milestones that make sense to most stakeholders. This is accomplished in the gantt chart by changing the default "all tasks" to only "key milestones" which allows us to have artistic advantage in our story telling. This is sent out in the weekly report and it ends the chatter of what pieces of the project/program are you working on and when is the expected delivery date.

It would be nice to be able to capture a chart that scrolls off the current screen, without having to do multiple screen shots and stitching them together.

Example:

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Appreciate your feedback @Jeffrey Bond 🙌

Jason Pontius

This thread appears to be stale. No comments in almost a year. Has there been any progress on improving this very poor feature?

Elizaveta Bogdanova

Hi @Jason Pontius! There are some enhancements in the works for Gantt Charts and we'll be announcing them in the coming weeks. For snapshots specifically, we don't have anything to share yet.

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