One file that shows how every project is doing — for a portfolio review, a steering pack or a monthly update. Export one space (a department or programme), or everything in every space.

1 · Get ready (once)

• Put projects into spaces if you want them grouped: drag a project onto a space in the sidebar, or use the project's ⋯ → Move to a space… Projects with no space sit under Unassigned.
• Use your company look: load your Brand Kit or brand skill in Settings → 🎨 Brand Kit (colours, company name, tagline, logo, font). Without one, the export uses the theme picked in the Export window.

2 · Export

3 · What's in the file

Excel has the same information as sheets: Portfolio (a row per project, with filters), Spaces (all spaces only), Milestones, Needs attention, and a task sheet per project. Excel files can't carry the brand colours; the company name is in the title.

How the status is decided

• Needs attention — health grade D or F, any stuck task, or more than two overdue tasks.
• Watch — health grade C, or any overdue task.
• On track — everything else.

Good to know

• PDF opens a print view — choose Save as PDF. It is set to A4 landscape; allow pop-ups for this site if nothing opens.
• Archived projects are left out. The numbers are as of the moment you export.
• A watermark chosen in the Export window (DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL…) is added to the PowerPoint too.
• These files are not encrypted — share them with care. To hand over the projects themselves (to re-import), use Export space — JSON pack instead.
• File names follow the space and the time, e.g. R&D at a glance_2026_09_14_10_30_00.pptx, so exports never overwrite each other.

Track money per task for a financial year: what was approved, what has been spent and what you expect to spend. The app adds up each phase and the whole project, and shows where you are over.

The columns

“FY26” in the headings comes from the financial-year box in the top bar — change the year there and the headings follow. Settings → Interface sets when the financial year starts.

1 · Show the columns

• Basic shows FY Budget $ and FY Actual $.
• Advanced also shows Forecast and the three difference columns.
• To show or hide any of them, open ☰ Columns on the Table and tick or untick it. Your choice is kept.

2 · Enter amounts

1. Click a cell in FY Budget $ and type a whole number — no currency sign or commas (45000).
2. Press Enter to save and go down to the next task, or Tab / the arrow keys to move to the next cell — just like a spreadsheet.
3. Or open a task (click its name) and fill in Budget $ and Actual $ in the detail panel. If you leave Budget empty there, it suggests an amount based on similar tasks in the same phase.
4. Many rows at once: copy a column of numbers from Excel or Google Sheets, click the first cell and paste. ⌘/Ctrl+D copies the cell above into the rows you have ticked.

3 · Read the results

• Difference columns update as you type. A positive number means over; a negative number means under.
• Timeline → $ Vitals adds a narrow money column beside the chart: actual against budget for every task and phase, in red when over.
• Present view shows a Budget vs Spend card with the totals and a bar per phase.
• Insights → 🗺 Budget Efficiency shows spend by phase and task as boxes sized by budget.
• The Dashboard and the top of Home show the project's total budget.

Sharing and exports

• Excel and CSV exports include the money columns, and importing a spreadsheet with Budget / Actual / Forecast columns fills them in.
• Not everyone should see the numbers? Settings → Access Level → Hide budget/actual/forecast from Comment/View-only access hides them in the Table, task details and Timeline tooltips for people with view or comment access.

Good to know

• Amounts are per financial year. For a project that spans two years, keep the current year's figures and record earlier spend in the notes, or keep one project per year.
• Undo (⌘Z / Ctrl+Z) reverses a change to any amount.

Keep a record of every catch-up about this project: who came, what was discussed, what was decided and who does what next. Notes are saved with the project, so they are in backups, exports, restores and live shared folders.

1 · Start the notes

1. Open the project and click the 📝 Notes tab (next to Dashboard).
2. Pick the kind of meeting: Weekly catch-up, Stand-up, 1:1, Review / steering or Blank. Each fills in a starter agenda.
3. Click ＋ New notes. The title, today's date and the time are filled in — change them if needed.
4. If you have met before with the same kind of meeting, the attendees and any unfinished action items come across automatically (marked “carried over”), so nothing gets lost between catch-ups.

2 · During the meeting

• Attendees: type a name and press Enter, or click a suggested name (people already in the project or on the team roster). × removes someone.
• Agenda: what you planned to cover.
• Notes: type the discussion as it happens. Everything saves as you type.
• 📊 Insert project status adds a short summary to the notes: overall progress, what finished since the last catch-up, what is overdue and what is due in the next two weeks. Handy to open the meeting with.
• Decisions: one decision per line.

3 · Action items

• ＋ Add a row: what needs doing, the owner and a due date.
• 🔍 Find in notes reads the notes for lines like “Sam will send the contract by Friday” or “Amy to review the budget by Monday” and adds them with the owner and date filled in.
• → Task turns an action into a task in the plan (with the owner and due date, and a note saying which meeting it came from). → Make tasks of all does every action at once.
• An action and its task stay linked: the row shows #15 open or #15 ✓ done, and ticking the action done also completes the task. Click the link to open the task.

4 · After the meeting

• 📋 Copy minutes copies a tidy version (title, date, attendees, agenda, notes, decisions, action items) to paste into an email or chat.
• ⬇ Download (.md) saves the same as a Markdown file named after the project, meeting and date. It is not encrypted — share it with care.
• ⚙ In exports (top of the Notes tab) adds your minutes to other exports — each one switched on separately: PDF / Print (a Meeting notes section), Excel (Meeting notes and Action items sheets), the PowerPoint deck (a Meeting Notes slide) and Space at a glance (a Latest catch-up page per project). All off to begin with.
• ↻ Next catch-up starts the next meeting of the same kind with the same people and the open actions.

5 · Put minutes in your exports

Meeting notes can travel with your reports. Each kind of export has its own switch — all are off until you turn them on.

1. Open the 📝 Notes tab and click ⚙ In exports (next to ＋ New notes).
2. Tick the exports that should include your minutes. The choice is remembered for next time.
3. Export as usual — the meeting notes are added automatically.

• A project with no meeting notes simply gets no meeting page or slide.
• Action items carried over from one catch-up to the next are listed once, not repeated for every meeting.
• These exports are not encrypted — minutes can hold sensitive discussion, so check before you send. For one meeting only, use 📋 Copy minutes or ⬇ Download (.md).
• Minutes are always saved with the project anyway — in backups, JSON exports and live shared folders — whether or not these switches are on.

Finding past meetings

• The list on the left shows every meeting, newest first, with the number of attendees, actions done (amber when some are still open) and decisions.
• Search notes… looks through titles, notes, agendas, decisions, attendees and actions.

Good to know

• Undo (⌘Z / Ctrl+Z) reverses tasks created from actions. Typing in the notes saves directly.
• 🗑 Delete removes the meeting notes only — tasks made from its action items stay in the plan.
• In a live shared folder, everyone in the project sees the notes. If two people edit notes at the same moment, the later save wins, so agree who takes the minutes.
• Also in the command palette (⌘K): New meeting notes.
• Just want tasks out of pasted notes, without keeping minutes? Use Meeting Notes → Tasks in the command palette.

Drag a bar or milestone sideways to change its dates. When a task has other tasks linked after it (they depend on it), you choose whether those move too.

The two modes

1 · Pick the mode

1. Open the Timeline tab.
2. In the toolbar, find Drag: and click ● Alone or ⛓ With linked tasks. Your choice is remembered.

2 · Drag

1. Press on a bar and move sideways. It snaps to whole days.
2. A label next to the pointer says what will happen, for example “⛓ Moving with 4 linked tasks · +3d”.
3. Let go to apply it. A message confirms what moved.

3 · Read the colours

Switch for one drag: hold Shift

• Holding Shift while dragging uses the other mode, just for that drag. You can press or release Shift mid-drag and watch the preview change.

Good to know

• Undo: ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z puts every moved task back in one step.
• Red after a move? Drag the task again with ⛓ With linked tasks, move the late task by hand, or open 🩺 Health Check to see every date that breaks a link.
• What counts as “linked”: tasks whose Depends On names this task — and the tasks that depend on those, and so on. Create links by right-clicking a bar → 🔗 Link to a task that comes after…, or by dragging the small dot at the end of a bar onto another task.
• Tasks linked before the one you drag never move.
• Changing the order (up and down, not dates): hover a task in the list on the left and drag its ⠿ grip. Drop it under another phase to move it into that phase. Or select the row and press Alt+↑ / Alt+↓, or right-click → Move Up / Move Down. Sub-tasks travel with their parent.
• Changing length isn't affected by the mode: dragging a bar's left edge changes only its start; dragging the right edge later also pushes back any linked task that would otherwise start too early.
• In a live shared folder, a move with linked tasks reaches everyone as one change.

Everyone points Gantt Forge at one shared folder — in Google Drive, OneDrive/SharePoint, Dropbox, iCloud or on your network — and changes travel through it. No server, no account; everything written there is encrypted with a password only your team knows. The whole set-up is one panel with three steps, and every folder or cloud icon in the app opens it.

Before you start

• Chrome, Edge or Opera on a computer — they can open folders on disk; Safari, Firefox and phones cannot.
• The shared folder must be on your computer: install the service's desktop app (Google Drive for desktop, OneDrive, Dropbox, iCloud for Windows) or, for a SharePoint/Teams library, open it in the browser and click Sync.
• Put the projects you want to share in a space (drag them under a space in the sidebar). A space is what you share.

Step 1 · The shared folder

1. Click the Stored in chip at the top (or the cloud badge next to a space, or Integrations → Team sync).
2. Click 📁 Choose the shared folder… and pick the team's folder. Any level works: the folder that holds GanttForge Live, that folder itself, or a space's folder inside it.
3. Allow editing when the browser asks. The panel names the service it detected; if it couldn't tell, pick it from the row of buttons.
4. Check Others see you as — that name and its initials are what your team sees on the tasks you have open.

Step 2 · The team password

• First in the team? Click Set the team password…, choose one of 12+ characters, and pass it on in person or through a password manager — never in the same message as the folder link.
• Joining? Click Enter the team password… and type the one your team uses. It is checked against the folder straight away; a wrong one is refused and nothing changes.
• It is saved on that computer, so you are asked once. Nobody can recover it — keep it somewhere safe.

Step 3 · Share, or join

While you work together

• The chip at the top shows a ☁ cloud and the service name while syncing; the badge next to the space shows a green dot. Both open the panel, which shows who is editing and offers Sync now and Stop.
• Each person's initials sit on the task they have open, and every change that arrives flashes the cell it changed in their colour.
• Stop is stopping: nothing restarts until you press ▶ Resume. Up to 10 people edit at once; anyone after that watches.
• Attached files (📎 on a task) stay on the computer that added them. Project pictures, codes, colours and target dates do travel.

When something is off

• 🩺 Troubleshooting (bottom of the panel) shows every project, every browser's file in the folder and what each holds — and has the repairs: send mine / take the folder's per project, colours & codes, tidy, shorten, merge, rebuild, and Change the team password (which re-encrypts the folder for everyone).
• Start again from scratch forgets the folder, the password and every link to it on that computer — projects and folder untouched — and walks the three steps again.
• After a browser restart the folder may need permission again: the panel says so and offers Reconnect.

Everyone opens the same project from the same shared folder — up to 10 people editing at once — and sees each other's changes within seconds. Each person's app writes its own encrypted file into the folder; the apps merge them field by field.

What you need

• A folder everyone can reach on their own computer: a shared Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive (desktop app) folder, iCloud Drive, or a network drive.
• Chrome, Edge or Opera on each computer (they can open folders on disk; Safari and Firefox cannot).
• One file password for the team, shared privately (not in the same folder). It encrypts everything written there.

1 · Set up once, on each computer

1. Make sure the shared folder is synced to this computer (the Dropbox/OneDrive/Drive app shows it in Finder or File Explorer).
2. Open 🧩 Integrations → 📁 Cross-Device File Sync → Choose Synced Folder and pick that folder. Allow access when the browser asks.
3. Open Settings → Security → Set a file password and enter the team's password — the same one on every computer.
4. Optional: in the same window, give this computer a name under This device is known as — that is how others see you.

2 · Start live (one person)

1. Open the project you want to share.
2. In Cross-Device File Sync, click ▶ Start live for this project.
3. A green dot and your initials appear at the top. The project is now in the folder as GanttForge Live / Project name — a1b2c, and your files inside are named after you, so anyone browsing the folder can tell what is what. The contents stay encrypted.
4. The project is bound to that folder: starting live again always reuses it, never a new copy. If a project with the same name is already live there, you are asked to join it instead.

Share a whole space

• Open a space's ⋯ menu in the sidebar → 📁 Share this whole space live in the folder (or the button in Cross-Device File Sync). Every project in the space goes into GanttForge Live / Space name (space), and a 📁 appears next to the space.
• The project you have open syncs in real time. The rest sync in the background every 20 seconds, so dashboards, Space at a glance and exports show everyone's latest.
• Add a project to the space — or someone else does — and it appears for everyone. Joining a space brings all of its projects; ones you already have (same name) are used, not copied.
• Deleting a project only removes it from your browser. Password-protected projects aren't shared.

3 · Join (everyone else)

1. In Cross-Device File Sync, click 👥 Join a live project… — pick a whole space, or just one project.
2. Pick the project from the list — it shows who started it. If the list says a different password is in use, check your file password.
3. The project opens with the live version. If you already have a project with the same name, you can use it rather than make a second one — the version you had is kept as a rolling snapshot.
4. Files from a browser nobody has used for 14 days are moved into _retired devices — their changes are already merged, and nothing is deleted.

4 · While you work

• Just edit as usual. Changes are shared a couple of seconds after you make them, and others' changes appear on your screen the same way.
• Where everyone is: each person's initials sit on the row they have open — in the table, the timeline and the board — and every change that arrives flashes the cell it changed in that person's colour. Turn it off in the space's cloud badge (👀) or in Cross-Device File Sync. It refreshes at the folder's own speed, so it is a “who is where” signal, not a moving mouse pointer.
• Who's here: the initials at the top are the people in the project right now, with a count such as 4/10 editing seats in use. They flash when someone else changes something. Hover for the full list.
• Speed: 1–3 seconds on a network drive; on a cloud folder, as fast as that app copies files — usually 5–30 seconds.
• Two people, same task: changes to different fields are both kept; if both change the same field, the later change wins.
• Deleting: a deleted task stays deleted — unless someone edits it after the delete, which brings it back.
• Typing: if a change arrives while you are typing in a cell, it waits until you finish, so your cursor never jumps.
• Offline for a while? Keep working. When the folder syncs again, your changes and theirs merge the same way.

Up to 10 people editing at once

• Ten editors can work in one live project at the same time.
• The 11th person watches. When all seats are taken, joining offers 👁 Watch: you see every change live, but nothing you change is shared (and it is replaced by the live version). A 👁 appears in place of your initials.
• When a seat frees up — someone clicks Leave live, or closes the app for about a minute — watchers get a message. Open Cross-Device File Sync and click ✏️ Start editing; you start from the live version.
• Keeping it fast with a full team: each person's app writes to the folder only when they change something, so ten editors don't cause ten writes per change. A network drive keeps things within a few seconds; on a cloud folder, expect the sync app's usual delay.
• Tips for a big group: give each computer a clear name (This device is known as), agree who owns which part of the plan, and avoid two people retyping the same cell at the same moment — the later change wins.
• Two people who join in the very same second can briefly make it 11; nothing breaks, and the count settles when someone leaves.

5 · Leave, and come back later

• Click the initials at the top, or open Cross-Device File Sync, and choose ⏹ Leave live. Your copy stays on your computer; your latest changes stay in the folder for the others.
• After closing the browser, the project resumes live on its own when you open it again. If the browser needs permission for the folder again, click ▶ Resume live in Cross-Device File Sync.

If something isn't working

• Not seeing others' changes? Check the shared folder is syncing on both computers (look for the sync app's tick), and that you both opened the project through Join / Start live.
• “Started with a different file password” — everyone must use exactly the same file password.
• “Folder not reachable” — the drive is disconnected or permission lapsed: reconnect the drive, then open Cross-Device File Sync and allow access.
• Buttons are greyed out — choose the folder first, and use Chrome, Edge or Opera.
• A red dot at the top means the last sync attempt failed; hover over it to see why.

Good to know

• Everything written to the folder is encrypted with the file password (AES-256). Without it, the files can't be read — by the cloud service or anyone else.
• Pictures sync too. Attached files stay on the computer that added them — share those separately.
• Want changes shared only when you choose? Use 📤 Export to Synced Folder and 📥 Import Latest From Folder in the same window instead of live.