having a bit of trouble getting started with this problem, and not much luck googling solutions. I can't use MS Project to display gantt charts, so am wanting to use VBA to draw a pretty gantt chart in Excel from an Access database of tasks, time to complete task, preceding tasks, etc. I know VBA, but am having trouble conceptualising this problem. In other words I'm happy with the drawing, Access connection etc... just having trouble working out how to get the start date of each task given every task could theoretically effect every other task. Attached very simple example of the problem... standard CPM stuff, where I have one example of A as a precedent to tasks B and D. If I think of this in terms of paths there's a path A-B-C, and a path A-D-E... If my code calculates the start point A based on A-B-C then that won't be enough time for A-D-E to complete by go live, so A would have to be based on A-D-E...Seems simple but with 20 tasks with various precedents along the way, it gets complicated... i.e. I can loop through and find a bunch of unique paths, and I can find the longest path but that wouldn't necessarily give me the viable minimum start date for each task, as there may be other dependent tasks that branch off and take longer, therefore the original path needs to start earlier, then all of the tasks within that path are shifted, so any calculations on related paths would then have to be shifted... I feel compelled to write more about what I've tried to show I've at least made an effort but fear it may sound like giberish! Anyway: my first attempt had a recursive function that would loop through each activity, and so starting at A it would it would go do i have subsequent task(s) if it did, then the function would call itself again for B, then C, return that for B, return that for A... And it would loop through each of the subsequent tasks if it found more than one, and choose the minimum date... i.e. return E for D, then D for A, and choose D over B (D < B)But I couldn't just loop through that same approach for each activity, as if i started at B, then found subsequent activities, I wouldn't get the same B as above... because that B was dependent on D and E (due to A). So then i'm thinking well I either need to include a look back as well as a look forward. But that gave me a bit of a headache. Or I really need to store my dates for each task as i go, so I could store a date for A, B, C... and then calculate the path A D E, which would mean i'd have to change A, B, and C again... but then once I have a large number of tasks, it would seem I would be going back and recalculating everything over and over again...Am I on the right track? Seems like i'm tending towards kind of a brute force where i'm just looping through the same calculations over and over again until everything settles and finds it's minimum start date... I feel there's a smart way of doing it that I'm missing?
What are the key concepts in CPM/Gantt Chart algorithms?
vba;gantt chart