I was privileged to be invited to the biennial Robins & Morton conference in Orlando recently, where I assisted in presenting TimeTable to the hundreds of attendees there. A single wall-hanger (OPS) TimeTable Visio diagram automatically drawn from #OraclePrimaveraCloud data, is a condensed version of the same data printed as a Gantt chart some six times taller, as shown in the image below (there wasn’t enough ceiling height to print all the Gantt):
I was asked recently about making Visio timelines with dates earlier than 1900, which is the start of time as far as Microsoft Office products are concerned, so I thought I’d try to adapt one of my approaches used on other projects. In this case, I am assuming that the data is coming from an Excel worksheet, and I will use the Link Data to Shapes feature in Visio Professional/Premium. Visio Standard users can still make the timelines manually, or could attempt to use the older Database Wizard.
The first decision I made was not to use date fields in Excel or Visio because of the 1st Jan 1900 is the start of everything issue. Therefore I created a table in a worksheet that splits the Start and End dates in Year, Month and Day columns:
[Read more…] about Making Timelines with Dates Earlier than 1900 in Visio