The Dashboard provides a real-time executive overview of your project's health — KPI cards, a progress donut chart, status breakdown, upcoming milestones, top cost tasks, and critical path summary — all calculated live from your current task data.
Click VIEW → Dashboard in the ribbon, or press D while the Gantt has focus. The Dashboard opens as a full-area overlay on top of the Gantt. Click the × button or press Escape to return to the Gantt view.
The Dashboard recalculates every time you open it. There is no manual refresh button — simply close and reopen the Dashboard after making changes to tasks. All figures reflect the current in-memory state of the project, including any unsaved edits.
The top row shows six KPI cards, each with a large number and a label. Hover any card for a tooltip explaining the calculation.
Formula: Count of all rows where type = task or type = milestone. Summary phases are excluded because they are containers, not work items.
Use: A quick sanity check on project scope. If the number is unexpectedly high or low, you may have accidentally created duplicate tasks or forgotten to add a section.
Formula: Count of tasks/milestones where progress === 100 OR status === 'Complete'. Either condition independently marks a task as complete.
Use: At a weekly review, this number should be visibly growing. A flat Complete count over multiple weeks is an early warning of execution problems.
Formula: Count of tasks/milestones where status === 'In Progress' AND progress < 100.
Use: An unusually high In Progress count often means tasks were started but not driven to completion — a common sign of context-switching or blocking issues.
Formula: Count of tasks/milestones where endDate < today AND progress < 100. Today is the browser's local date at Dashboard open time.
Use: This is the most urgent KPI. Any non-zero value deserves immediate attention. Click through to the Gantt, enable filters for status, and address overdue items before they cascade through the dependency network.
Formula: The span in calendar days from the earliest task start date to the latest task end date across the entire project. Not the sum of all task durations.
Use: Gives the project's elapsed time window. Compare this to the original planned duration to understand how much the overall schedule has shifted.
Formula: sum(task.progress × task.duration) / sum(task.duration) — a duration-weighted average. Tasks with zero duration (milestones) contribute a binary 0 or 1 × a nominal weight of 0.5 days.
Use: More accurate than a simple average of percentages because it accounts for the fact that a 20-day task carries more weight than a 1-day task.
The donut chart visualises the distribution of all tasks and milestones across five status values. Each segment is labelled with the count and percentage of total items.
| Status | Segment Colour | Condition |
|---|---|---|
| Not Started | Muted grey | status = 'Not Started' AND endDate ≥ today |
| In Progress | Blue | status = 'In Progress' AND progress < 100 |
| Complete | Green | progress = 100 OR status = 'Complete' |
| On Hold | Amber/orange | status = 'On Hold' |
| Cancelled | Red/dark | status = 'Cancelled' |
Overdue items appear in their own status colour but are additionally flagged in the Overdue KPI card — there is no separate overdue segment in the donut. An overdue task that is still "In Progress" counts in the blue segment.
Hover any segment to see the exact count, percentage, and a sample list of up to five task names in that category.
Below the donut is a horizontal stacked bar that shows the same five status segments proportionally. The bar is useful for quick visual comparison: a predominantly green bar means the project is largely complete; a large grey (Not Started) section early in the project is normal but alarming late in the schedule.
Lists all incomplete milestones (progress < 100 %) sorted by date ascending. Each row shows:
If there are no upcoming milestones (all complete, or none defined), the panel shows a checkmark message: "All milestones complete."
This panel lists the five most expensive tasks in the project, ranked by calculated cost descending. Each row shows the task name, assigned resources, and total cost. The total is calculated as: sum(resource.ratePerDay × task.durationDays) for all resources assigned to that task.
This panel is only populated when Cost Tracking is enabled in Settings. If cost tracking is off, the panel shows a prompt to enable it.
Use this panel to identify where budget is concentrated. If the top task accounts for more than 30–40 % of total project cost, it may warrant closer monitoring or a contingency reserve.
Shows a summary of the critical path: the number of critical tasks, the project's calculated finish date, and the total float of the project (which is always zero for the critical path itself).
A View on Gantt link closes the Dashboard and enables the Critical Path highlight in the VIEW tab so you can immediately see the critical chain highlighted in red on the timeline.
When cost tracking is disabled (Settings → Cost Tracking = Off):
When cost tracking is enabled:
sum(task.cost × task.progress / 100) — the earned-value approximation.See Cost Tracking for how to configure resource rates and assign resources to tasks.
A practical workflow for weekly project status reporting:
The fastest way: a small download icon at the bottom-right of the project title card on the Dashboard. Click it and DPlan captures the entire visible Dashboard (KPIs, charts, EVM card, milestones, cost table, tip strip if present) and downloads it as <ProjectName>_Dashboard_YYYY-MM-DD.pdf — paginated A4 landscape if the content is taller than one page.
The same export is also available via EXPORT → Export PDF ribbon button, which becomes view-aware: when the Dashboard is the active view, it routes to the dashboard PDF capture; on the Gantt, it produces the Gantt PDF; other views fall back to the Quick View HTML export.
At the top of the Dashboard you'll see a premium gradient strip — Today's Insight. It surfaces one rotating tip per calendar day to help you discover features you might be missing. The same tip stays all day on refresh; tomorrow you'll see a different one.
Each tip has a colour-coded badge:
Click the gradient Try it now → button to deep-link straight to the feature. If you've already used a feature, the "NEW TO YOU" badge stops appearing on its tip — it would be misleading.
Don't want today's tip? Click the × in the top-right to dismiss it for the day. Tomorrow brings a different insight.