What’s new in Milestones Professional 2019?

Combine cells visually by hiding the lines between cells
Have vertical text in cells
Put a border around cells (or groups of cells)
Your cell text can now overflow past the edge of the cell (useful if you want the text to take up multiple cells)
Full redo feature, so you can undo an action, and redo an action, up to 100 times.
Copy and Paste your legend from one schedule to another
Blank individual Smartcolumn Cells
Improved Percent Complete view – more options are available for showing Percent Complete bars on task rows
New Color Themes – And you can import the older ones, too!
New watermark layer for Pictures and Text – drawn under the bars and symbols, but over all shading

Rotate Freeform Text by 30 or 45 degrees
New options for the Legend Border
Fill Pattern drop-down made larger
Automatically remove cell overrides
New Find / Replace ALL feature added to Edit Tab
~~Strikeout text~~ option added to all text setting menus
Added additional Datagraph font options
Symbol Hyperlink hotspot improvements
Symbol Type Usage Report added
Show curtains in Datagraph even if hidden elsewhere
New Freeform Text Substitutable Strings added – you can total column values
And much more!

Buy Milestones Professional 2019

Rotate Text in Cells

It is now possible to rotate text in cells. It can be rotated to 90 or 270 degrees. This is useful when someone wants to use rotated text to categorize groups of task rows:

Notice that the horizontal gridlines do not enter the vertical text area. This is accomplished by using the cell by cell option to hide the bottom grid line:

This new option to hide the bottom gridline in a cell makes it easy to group cells using a solid background color and hiding the gridlines.

Note: When cell text is rotated, only text to the first hard return is included. Rotated cell text will be displayed outside of the cell which is what allows it to overlap other rows. When the text is altered only the column is redrawn. So if the text was showing above or below the column there may be remnants left which will go away when the screen is refreshed.

New Color Themes

We’ve revamped our Color Themes in the Format Tab, and here are a few examples:

Strikeout Text Functionality Added

You can now strikeout text, which helps you communicate effectively:

Redo Functionality Added

With version 2019, you can now Redo something that you have Undone.

Put custom borders around cells or groups of cells

We’ve added an option to put a border around cells, or just parts of cells:

Allow Cell Text to Overflow Cells

You can click on any cell any set the new option that allows text to overflow its cell:

There are two new controls used with this feature. The first checkbox (circled above) “Allow Text to Overflow from Cell” tells Milestones to ignore the cell boundaries when displaying the text.

The other option “Hide Right Grid” (also circled above) tells Milestones to not draw the right side column boundary of a cell.

In the example above, in the first row, the middle cell has the “Allow Text to Overflow from Cell” is set.

In the example above, in the first row, the leftmost and middle cell have the “Hide Right Grid” options set.

Copy and Paste Legend

You right-click on the Legend Area and select Copy Legend:

When the Legend is copied, a dialog box appears explaining how to paste the legend and the effects of the Toolbox settings, i.e., you are warned that symbols and connectors are pulled from the current Toolbox and that it may be necessary to also copy/paste the Toolbox to ensure that the symbols and connectors are the same when pasted.

New Legend Border Options

You can now alter the border of the Legend. By default, the Legend always uses the current schedule frame line width and color. Using the new options, you can leave the Legend border at its default settings or alter the border. This option is most useful when the Legend is floating, but the settings are also respected when the Legend is in its normal attached position at the bottom of the schedule. The settings are in the Full Legend Selection Toolbar:

Find/Replace All

The new Find/Replace All button in the edit menu lets you find all occurrences of a text string and have the results displayed in a dialog box:

The dialog box lets you enter the string, then search for it or Search/Replace if the Replace with: box is checked, and then, once the results are displayed, you can select any result and press the Go To Current Selection button. If you selected Replace, you can Undo the changes made while in the Search/Replace dialog by pressing the Undo button (if you have the Multi-Undo feature active undo Tools Program Options | Edit).

When you go to the current selection, the object is selected and the Toolbar changes to display the item, as if you had clicked on it with the mouse:

Symbol Type Usage Report

This new report creates a table of symbols found either on the schedule or in a column. It is useful for comparing number of events.

In the sample below the column containing Root Cause is analyzed. The counts and percentages show that most of the causes were related to configuration issues, while only 5 percent of the issues were related to bugs:

New Freeform Text Substitutable Strings

The following substitutable strings have been added to Freeform Text:

&coltotCC, where CC is the column number from 1 to 20. The total of the numbers in the column will be substituted. Note that outlining is respected, so any numbers in a Summary row are ignored.

&colavgCC, where CC is the column number from 1 to 20. The average of the numbers in the column will be substituted. Note that outlining is respected, so any numbers in a Summary row are ignored. Also, any values of zero are ignored to ensure that rows intentionally left blank are ignored. If there are valid values of zero, then the average will not be correct.

&colCCsymSS, where CC is the column number from 1 to 20 and SS in the Toolbox symbol number from 1 to 64. The total number of symbols of Toolbox type SS will be substituted.

An example of the use of these strings is shown below:

Even more improvements!

Check out our “New Features in Milestones Professional 2019” (PDF) to see even more additions and improvements.