GanttProject

Around a hundred years ago, a man named Henry Gantt developed a new tool for project management. Named eponymously, the Gantt chart has become an essential tool in the project manager’s toolkit, used even on enormous undertakings like the Hoover Dam and the United States Interstate Highway System. (For more informarion about Mr. Gantt, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt.)

Today, the world’s most popular project management software, Microsoft Project, incorporates Gantt charts as a matter of course. Linux users, being the hearty breed they are, have developed several good software packages for project management, too, with Planner (http://developer.imendio.com/wiki/Planner) being the most well-known. But another interesting up-and-comer is GanttProject, which, to no surprise, makes Gantt charts. Although GanttProject is still a little rough in places, it bears a look by any project planning Penguinista.

GanttProject depends on Java, so make sure you have a JRE installed on your system before continuing (and since it’s Java-based, it runs on Windows and Mac OS X, as well as Linux). Once you’re sure that a JRE is available and in your PATH, download GanttProject from the project’s web site at http://ganttproject.sourceforge.net. Do the usual SourceForge dance of choosing a download location, and soon after (depending on how long it takes your connection to download a 13 MB file) you’ll have a zipped file on your machine. But don’t unzip the file just yet, lest you puke puke files…

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