Gantt

A gantt room is for plans where sequence matters. You schedule work as bars on a timeline, draw dependencies between tasks, and mark milestones — and the room computes the critical path, the chain of tasks that actually determines your end date. When something slips, you know immediately whether the deadline moved or you have slack.

Create a gantt room

Click + in your space's sidebar and pick the gantt room type. Choose its visibility as you create it: open to everyone in the space or limited to certain people.

Build the plan

You have three ways to get work onto the timeline:

• Import from your boards. Pull existing work in from table or kanban boards instead of retyping it. The timeline and the task list stay one body of work — plan the sequence in the gantt while the team keeps working the board.
• Start from a template. Fourteen templates cover common plan shapes when you'd rather begin from a pattern.
• Let the AI draft it. The AI plan generator takes a description of what you're planning and drafts a timeline. It's a starting point that saves the blank-page hour, not a plan you're stuck with — edit it like anything else.

Schedule and sequence

Everything on the timeline is direct manipulation:

• Drag to schedule. Move and stretch bars to set dates and durations. Replanning takes seconds, which is what keeps a plan true instead of stale.
• Draw dependencies. Link tasks so the plan knows what waits on what. Sequencing becomes visible on the chart instead of living in someone's head.
• Mark milestones. Pin the dates that matter — launches, reviews, handoffs — and see how the work lines up against them.

Read the critical path

The critical path is the chain of dependent tasks that sets your finish date. The room computes and shows it, so you can focus attention where a slip actually moves the deadline — and answer "what happens if this task runs long?" with a picture instead of an argument.

Pull in work from elsewhere

A gantt chart can also read from systems outside Openbook. Connect Jira, Azure DevOps, or any REST endpoint, and their work appears as tasks on the timeline, refreshed on a schedule — with a Sync now button for when you do not want to wait.

That is how a plan that spans two tools stays one plan. The same kind of connection is available on Dashboard rooms.

Zoom to the right altitude

Switch between day, week, and month views on the same timeline. Run the current week in day view, review the quarter in month view; the plan doesn't change, only how much of it you see at once.

Tips

• Import from the board rather than duplicating tasks by hand — retyped plans drift from reality within a sprint.
• Draw dependencies before you obsess over dates. Once the sequence is right, dragging bars into a workable schedule is quick.
• Check the critical path after every replan; it often shifts to a chain nobody was watching.
• Use the AI draft for unfamiliar project shapes, then reshape it — reviewing a wrong-ish plan is faster than staring at an empty timeline.

FAQ

Do I have to rebuild board work in the gantt? No. Import it. The gantt is a planning view over work that can keep living on the board.

What exactly does the AI plan generator produce? A draft timeline built from your description. You edit it like any plan: drag bars, add dependencies, set milestones.

Why should I care about the critical path? It tells you which slips move the end date and which don't — that's the difference between reacting to every delay and reacting to the ones that matter.

Can one gantt serve both weekly execution and quarterly review? Yes. Day, week, and month zoom levels are views of the same timeline.