GanttProject: Free Gantt Chart Software for Project Management

Laura Jean Karr
Categories : Project management software reviews, tips, & tutorials
Tags : Project management

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Where Did the Gantt Idea Come From?

The idea for creating Gantt charts and using that style of business organization, all got started in the early productivity days in America when one man decided that there just had to be a better way to keep a business running smoothly.

Henry Gantt was an engineer back in the 1900’s who developed what some consider to be the first great tool in team project management by creating the Gantt chart. Mr. Gantt’s charts became the baselines for work on our country’s highway system, which I believe we all can agree was one of the largest project management challenges faced during the 1900’s in the United States.

The Gantt chart itself was a project management system that integrated the bar chart to lay out the project’s schedule, precedence network, terminal elements, current stats and the work breakdown structure. This chart has been utilized by both large and small company infrastructures for several years with a high rate of success.

So, how does one take the base of the Gantt chart and make it a more useable tool for team project planning and college students who want to work in project management through the information super highway generation and beyond?

You download it.

GanttProject Online

The GanttProject is an open source project management software application you can download as a fully integrated and geek-friendly project management system. Instead of using the basic Gantt chart, this application takes your project management control even further by adding a load chart for resources.

Though the overall program is open source, the two main authors who developed the basis for the GanttProject are Dmitry Barashev and Alexandre Thomas. Dmitry wrote the majority of the project’s code and to which both developers published to the web in 2003.

You also have the ability to exchange information with Microsoft Project, Excel and other spreadsheet applications with the bonus of being able to generate HTML and PDF reports for web based project management.

Some key benefits to using GanttProject as more than just a calendar for project management are:

As a live working application, it’s feature set is always being added to by its developers;
It’s a Java application that works on any OS that supports Java;
You can add your own code and really make the application work for your specific needs; and
Most importantly, as an open source project, it is free.

You can check out and download GanttProject at the developer’s project management website: GanttProject. For more information on other forms of project management that span both the personal and business use realm, see Best Software for Project Management: Reviews and Tips to Help You Manage Your Projects and Best Options in Open Source Contact Resource Management Software.