From Gantt Chart Grumbles to Greatness: A SAS Visual Analytics Tip

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At its most basic, a Gantt chart is useful for visualising project schedules and tasks performed in sequence (also in parallel).  SAS Visual Analytics (VA) offers a schedule chart which displays duration of events using horizontal bars over start-finish horizons. Unlike Gantt charts which are typically used by project managers to plan what should happen, I like to use schedule charts to analyse past events and how long they took; applications vary based on use case. Irrespective of whatjamayliketocallit—a Gantt chart, a schedule chart, or “that set of bars across dates”— we have common requirements regarding the order in which tasks are presented, and that’s what this article is about. The problem is that while VA's schedule chart makes it very easy to configure columns in a self-service manner, it's not possible to sort activities (the task object) by order of the dates on which they started (or ended, for that matter).  

At some level, I can guess at and appreciate the reason why - the X axis is actually a combination of two dates, the start and finish date - but the fact is that a typical analysis requires visualising activity in order of occurrence, and it's painfully laborious to have to go back to the input data and force fit the same. Thanks to an idea from my colleague @Renato_sas , we recently were able to work around this challenge and make our schedule chart display in a sensible manner.  It's a simple and pragmatic solution which proved useful in preventing unnecessary questions and complaints in a real internal project.  While we can't share that data with you, feel free to watch the following video which replicates the workaround on some mock data and let us know your thoughts. Hope you enjoyed this tip and get in touch here in case of any questions.