Also, the Flag field I’m using for each corresponds to the WBS left-most value, e.g., Flag4 for WBS 4. I’ve added several styles and given them rather obvious names. For example, the “WBS_1_Summary” style will be used whenever the field Flag1 is true. Add a new style by giving it a name, a unique format (color, pattern, shape, etc.), and specifying when it’ll be used. What I’m going to do is assign a different color to all summary tasks based on their WBS number. I’ve formatted the gantt chart as I prefer to show the Name field to the left of each bar and the finish date to the right. Here’s a link to the project file before we customize the gantt chart with color. I’ve created a MS Project 2007 project schedule from a software development template supplied by Microsoft. One simple way to improve the readability is to colorize the gantt chart summary bars based on some criteria, e.g., left-most WBS number. For a small project it’s not so bad but for larger projects it gets difficult to pick out what part of the schedule is being looked at.
Often times a larger project’s Gantt chart gets “busy” and hard to read.