I am a Sales Strategic Planning manager who needs to visualize business processes, as well as show easy to understand Gantt charts.

For those of you who don’t want to spend the money on a full-blown Microsoft Project application, I recommend GanttProject. GanttProject is a project scheduling application written in Java, featuring gantt charts, PERT charts, resource management, calendaring, and import/export (MS Project, HTML, PDF, spreadsheets) features.

The benefits of GanttProject are:
1) Price – it’s free through Sourceforge.net
2) Ease of use – similar to MS Project and
3) Import export functions for different applications.

The drawbacks are:
1) Limited support – it’s shareware. If you are not computer savvy, or need help, then this solution is not for you.
2) Few pre-built templates online and
3) Limited functionality. This is not a full project management application.

If you mainly use project management software to show dependencies in a slide presentation, or need a tool to see where projects may hit snags, this is a great package to use.