Let’s say you are the manager of your company and you need to create some articles for your company’s blog. And let’s say that this work is separated into 3 smaller tasks: Brainstorming, Analysing and Typing.

You have assigned Brainstorming to George, he has 2 days to finish it. After that, Nick should do the Analysing that lasts 2 days, after that, the whole text is written. Last, Maria should finalize it and upload it, which takes maximum 1 day.

We will implement this scenario firstly into Podio and then we will visualize it into SmartGantt

After connecting to Podio, we need to select where to create our Podio app, in this example, let’s say that we choose the company: BendixKiel

And let’s say we choose the workspace: Dimitris Playground

Now we have to think of a name for our app, so if it is related to developing blog articles for our company, we can call it: BlogArticles

Each item of our BlogArticles app should be a task that is done by a person. So, we should have 3 items, one for Brainstorming, one for Analysing and one for Typing. Let’s add fields to our app.

What are the fields that we need to add? There are two very important fields that need to be in our app, otherwise we cannot visualize the app through SmartGantt:

* Task name (or Task title, it’s up to you)

* Start date

For better visualizing in SmartGantt, you can also add the following fields:

* Task owner (or Employee)

* Progress

* End date

* Status

For our example, we will include all the previous fields in BlogArticles app

You should click to the small icon that is left of the name of Start Date field and End Date fields. You should select “hide end date”.

Optionally, you can select to hide time entry for both Start Date field and End Date field, because our charts in SmartGantt will be focused more on days and months, and not so much in time.

Next thing to do is creating items for our app. As said in the beginning, we will need 3 items, one for each person. We also need to fill in each item information.

After filling in all the information, you should have this in your screen:

Which means we are ready to use SmartGantt, so we visualize our BlogArticle app into a small chart.

After connecting to SmartGantt, click on the upper square icon on the left hand side. Then click to the “Create new chart” option.

Mapping of new chart to app begins, we will not explain lots of details, if you have problems you can check the existing tutorial article:  How to map a chart 

Just don’t forget that we shouldn’t link other apps to Blogarticle app, so when it is asked to write down more apps, simply click next.

We should also pass by the sub-referenced apps mapping menu, by clicking “Generate chart”. Please note that for more advanced apps, we need to use the last two mapping menus

Let’s talk about the new chart that has been created:

We can see a spreadsheet with lines and columns.

Lines: The upper line is always our app and the lower lines are the items of our app, or the tasks that need to be done in our case.  We can change the order of the lines by using “Sorting” option, not manually. We can never change the first line, that is always the app.

Columns: From second column to the right, there is always time. By default, SmartGantt has a day scale, but you can easily change the appearance of your chart by using “Scaling” option. It is recommended not to use hour scale, although it exists as an option.

Bars: The blue bar, that is on the top, is the total time duration of the project, which in our case is the “Our company’s history” article. You cannot move this bar directly, but you can do it indirectly, moving the rest of the brown bars.

The brown bars are showing how much time each task will take, and when it will be done in time. Each of the bars, either brown or blue bar has a small indicator, where you can regulate how much progress was done in each task. All changes in progress are automatically changed in Podio.

Why are 03 Oct and 04 Oct columns marked with light blue color?

It’s weekend! SmartGantt has this way of indicating weekends, so you cannot get confused with your tasks. Thus, we need to change the position of the brown bars in the spreadsheet, because we don’t want them to be put in weekend.

You can continue to the tutorial article: “How to work with dependencies”, which is using this basic example. There are plenty of articles that use this basic example in SmartGantt tutorials page, so you might need to remember this one while reading other tutorial articles.

Good luck with using SmartGantt!