Almost every question I get asked about Cases and Grants turns out to be a question about time. Which of these have been open longest? What's overlapping? What's due next, and how much of it lands in the same month?
CiviCRM knows all of this. Cases have start dates and end dates, grants have decision and due dates, activities have dates on them — the data is sitting right there. But every built-in way to look at it is a list or a table, and a table is a bad instrument for "when." You can sort a column by end date and still not see that four of the six items finish in the same fortnight.
"How do I see that in Civi?” I ask. No answer. So I export. I've done the spreadsheet version more than once: pull the cases out, build a chart, paste it somewhere else. It works, and but then it's outdated. Worse, it's now a copy of your data living outside the CRM, where nobody's permissions apply to it.
Digging deeper into the forums, I came across artifacts that it could have been a nice-to-have some time ago. I've been a Drupal developer for years, working on many of sites integrating with Civi. So after attending my first CiviCamp in Birmingham, I challenged myself to write my first extension.
What I wanted was to have these Case and Grant charts inside CiviCRM, drawing on the live records, respecting the same permissions as everything else, so the person looking at it sees exactly the cases they'd see anywhere else in the system. That's what CiviGantt is.
What I like the most is the dashlet. I put it on the CiviCRM home screen mostly to see whether it would work there, and it changed the home screen function for me entirely. Instead of opening it and going somewhere else, you open it and already know roughly where things stand.
The other place it earns its keep is reporting upward, which is where the export buttons came from. You can filter down to what a funder or the board actually asked about, then take the chart out as SVG or PNG for a presentation, or CSV if someone wants to play with the data from there.
CiviGantt is available to download in the Extensions Directory. If there's a set of dates in your Civi you've ever rebuilt in a spreadsheet, tell me which one — the renderer doesn't much care what it's drawing.
