- Gantt Chart
- Project Templates
- Task Management
- Workload Management
- Kanban View
- Team Collaboration
- Notifications
- Cost estimations
- Sharing Features
- Time Logging
- Reports
1. Gantt Chart View
We would be remiss to start a review of GantPro’s features on anything other than its Gantt Chart view, it being the software’s premier feature and all. Simply put, it is an excellent feature. With GantPro, you can create an unlimited number of projects. What’s more, you can add several projects to one tab, a feature that augurs well for companies that do different projects for the same company. There is also no restriction on the number of tabs you can create.
As you map out your project with details such as tasks, milestones, and deadlines, the software plots it out onto a Gantt Chart. The project dashboard is divided into two. On the left-hand side is the task-view panel, and the Gantt Chart view occupies the right side of the screen. You can expand the Gantt Chart view by sliding the screen divider to the left. The feature has a drag-and-drop functionality that allows you to drag tasks around to quickly and easily change metrics such as their due date or status. Importantly, if you change the due date on any of your tasks, the software automatically rejigs the timelines of all downstream tasks to match.
2. Project Templates
If you don’t want to design a project template from scratch, the software offers several free, pre-designed templates for you to use. GanttPro’s readymade templates are available in several project categories. These include everything from software development and catering to construction, web design, event planning, and retail. They come with pre-defined, industry-specific tasks already filled in. Furthermore, each category has subcategories of templates on offer. For example, the marketing project template has subcategories such as a social media marketing template, SEO marketing template, and a product launch marketing template, to name a few. Importantly, you can customize the pre-made templates to add or delete items as you need.
3. Task Management
As a project manager, this platform gives you a lot of control over your task settings. You add a task name and assign it to a team member; you also can color-code each one differently, create dependencies, assign a status and priority, track task progress in percentage, and add deadlines and notes to each. What’s more, you can add an unlimited number of subtasks under each task, a great feature for planning and organizing complex projects. Furthermore, you get the same organizational breakdown for subtasks as you do for tasks. Another nice feature here is the Critical Path tool that lets you highlight in red the crucial tasks central to the successful and timely completion of your project, thereby helping you and your team focus on what’s important.
4. Workload Management
The software’s Gantt Chart view has an inbuilt workload table that gives you an overview of each team member’s workload. You can then reassign and redistribute tasks if the table shows that one employee is overloaded, and another has nothing to do. This feature ensures the even distribution of work among your employees. The table allows you to switch between workload in hours or tasks per day.
5. Kanban View
In case Gantt Charts are not your thing, the software gives you the option of managing your projects using a Kanban view. However, this feature is not as fleshed out as its Gantt Chart view, and you cannot use it to create new milestones or tasks. That said, it is a neat tool to manage your existing tasks. The software’s Kanban Board view lets you categorize tasks into three columns: In progress, Done, and Closed. Tasks are laid out as a series of tiles in grid-like fashion within each column. You can drag the tiles to move a task from one column to another. Additionally, you can expand a column such that it occupies the entire screen by minimizing the other two.
6. Team Collaboration
While it does not have an in-app chat feature, GanttPro is not bereft of team collaboration tools. You or your team members can add comments to a task by clicking on the quote box icon. Helpfully, the comment fields come with in-built editors that correct any grammatical or spelling errors. Similarly, the software allows you to attach images and files to tasks as well. Subscribers of the individual plan can upload 300 MB worth of files, and the team plan users get 1500 MB file uploads.
7. Notifications
GanttPro offers users email and push notifications for six categories. These are:
- Task assigned notifications
- Task deadline notifications
- Task start date notifications
- @mention notifications
- Task comment notifications
- Attachment notifications
Team members can turn on or off these notifications. They can also set up the software to remind them of deadlines and start dates from 1 to 7 days in advance. The platform also alerts you with sound notifications when you are using the software.
8. Cost Estimations
The software has a robust cost estimation tool that helps you plan a budget for your projects. In GanttPro, you can assign a task to a team member or a virtual resource. Virtual resources are your material resources and freelance labor resources. Importantly, you can assign a task to one or more resources, even if they have different cost calculation values. The software automatically tallies all the resource costs to give you the total cost of each task. Similarly, all task costs are summed up and reflected in the cost of the whole project.
9. Exports
Another standout feature is GanttPro’s export functionalities. If you want to share project details and progress with your clients, the platform gives you two options. First, you can export your project’s Gantt Chart view to your clients. The software supports exports for several file types, including PDF, PNG, XML, and XLS. Additionally, these exports can be optimized for a variety of paper sizes from full size to tabloid and ledger sizes. Second, you can generate and share public URLs with your clients. The public URLs can be set to show a dynamic project view that reflects ongoing changes to your project or a static view that gives viewers only a stationary picture of your project’s Gantt Chart. Importantly, clients can only view and not edit your project page.
10. Time Logging
The ability to log time spent on each task is one of the software’s most recent feature additions. Due to the non-inclusion of an in-app timer that automatically logs time, however, this is a slightly lackluster tool. You will need to enter the time spent on each task manually. Nonetheless, using this tool, managers can keep an eye out for team members who are holding up a project by taking more than the average number of hours needed to complete a task.
11. Reports
The software’s reports feature also is a recent addition to its tool kit. Like the time log feature, it is underdeveloped. At present, you can only create time log reports. The reports can be generated based on filters such as task, project, user, date, or time. The software also allows you to export these reports as an Excel file.
