Creating a Gantt Chart for your Project for Free

ProjectLibre Screenshot

Today I wanted to work on the schedule of a project with the proper dependencies. More or less, I had the project tasks laid out as a long list (As I would if I were the only one to work on said project) and I needed to answer two main questions:

  • How much will it cost?
  • How many resources do we need?

The other question, which is always really hard to answer as a software developer, was: Can you make it happen in 6 months? But you know the answer to that one: Of Course! (and 6 months later: Not!)

So, I remembedered seeing a manager using MS Project which is what it is. In itself, I don't like the software too much, but it works well for the purpose. I don't have Microsoft Office. I'm a Linux dude living in California so I looked around to see whether I could find such a software and I found one: ProjectLibre.

It runs on Linux, MS-Windows, and Mac OS/X. It's written in Java so it makes sense that it would work on multiple platforms in this way.

My project isn't very large so it works just fine. There some slowness, though. Probably due to Java. The interface is very similar to MS-Windows 8 or 10. So it was easy to get back in the software since I already knew the basics. Now it was the first time I would create a complete project on my own in such a tool so it took me a little time to figure out things, but I was pleased by the results. It gave me the total duration for the project in days and hours and one thing I was especially interested in: the number of people to use in parallel because it's useless to hire 10 people if 5 of them are always going to be waiting on something that the other 5 are working on. We want our programmers to be busy 24/7!

The results can be saved in PDF and like 20 other formats (most of which I have no clue what they are!?)