Roadmap Project Recap
Some time ago I started to play around with a method to make Roadmaps from Excel data. Since working through the development of it on my Excel Ramblings site and in this article on Egghead Cafe, I had a fair amount of feedback on things people would like to see added.
Adding Callouts
One of the key things was for additional comment space. To do that I’ve added a whole bunch of new parameters to control creation of and placement of parameters. The idea is that you can select a callout shape to be associated with the main roadmap shape. Various parameters affect the placement of this callout relative to the main shape and both shapes are plotted.
Other callout positioning options are
- Make the main shape itself a callout, set the callout shape to ‘None’ and fix the duration and start date so it appears where you want it to on the roadmap. Mess around with the gap and height to get the look and feel and positioning you want.
- You could make the main shape ‘None’, and include an associated callout shape. Since you can assign a start date, duration, gap, height etc to any shape, including ‘None’, the associated callout would be positioned and sized as if ‘None was to be plotted, but of course only the callout would be visible.
Please check it out and let me have your feedback on this blog, or by email. You can download the latest RoadmapGenerator.xlsm from the downloads area
