We’ve introduced a powerful new feature designed to help you display exactly what you need on your schedule with greater clarity and customization.
Now, you can group various elements, including pictures, boxes, circles, lines, text, and even complete legend entries. This added flexibility means you can create fully customized visuals, whether you’re enhancing your schedule with tailored annotations or designing a custom legend to suit your unique requirements.
By grouping elements together, you can ensure consistent positioning and styling, making your schedules not only more informative but also more visually appealing.
As demonstrated with the Group Feature above, you can now add Legend Entries directly to boxes, making it easier to create highly customized legends.
For example, the legend shown on the left was created using background boxes for structure, large labels made with Freeform Text, six individual boxes with attached Legend Entries, and additional Freeform Text to label the bars. This flexible approach allows you to design legends that are both clear and tailored to your specific schedule layout.
One of the key advantages of the Group Feature is that it allows you to combine all these elements—legend entries, boxes, and text—into a single group. Once grouped, the legend becomes locked into place, making it easier to reposition as a whole without accidentally misaligning any parts.
Additionally, you can copy the entire grouped legend to other pages or even enable it to display consistently across all pages of your schedule. This feature provides a convenient way to maintain a clean and professional look throughout your entire project.
New Feature: Milestones Add-in for Microsoft Project
Transform Your Microsoft Project Experience with the New Milestones Professional Add-In!
Take your project scheduling to the next level with our powerful new add-in for Microsoft Project. Once installed, the Milestones add-in seamlessly integrates into your toolbar, giving you direct access to game-changing features.
⚡ Effortlessly Switch Between Tools: Move seamlessly between Microsoft Project and Milestones Professional to craft visually stunning schedules.
🎨 Customizable Templates: Design and save your own custom project import templates for a personalized scheduling experience. Reuse your favorite templates and create charts with just one click.
📊 Instant PowerPoint Integration: Present your schedules like a pro by instantly transforming them into polished PowerPoint slides.
🚀 Create & Update with Ease: Build impressive schedules in minutes and keep them up to date with a simple refresh.
🧙 Smart Wizard Guidance: Enjoy enhanced Gantt bar symbology and improved refresh reports that provide actionable insights for schedule updates.
💡 Optional, Yet Powerful: Prefer working directly in Milestones Professional? No problem—access all these features without the add-in too!
Elevate your project management game and create captivating schedules faster than ever!
Due to popular demand, we’ve introduced bars with built-in arrowheads in version 2025, making it easier than ever to create clear and professional-looking schedules. These arrowhead bars are particularly useful for indicating direction, flow, or dependencies between tasks at a glance.
You’ll also notice a wide variety of bar sizes to choose from, ensuring you can find the perfect fit for your specific scheduling needs. Whether you’re highlighting key milestones or emphasizing task progress, the flexibility in bar sizing and style gives you more control over the visual presentation of your schedule.
You might already know that you can shade holidays on your schedule, but we’ve taken this feature a step further by adding the ability to assign different colors to each holiday. This enhancement allows for better visual distinction between various types of holidays, such as federal holidays, company-specific breaks, plant closures, or regional observances.
By using unique colors for different holiday categories, your schedule becomes easier to read and interpret at a glance, helping you quickly identify key dates and periods without confusion.
New Feature: Bar Gradient Options and Bar End Line Removal
We’ve expanded your customization options for bars, giving you greater flexibility in how they look and feel. You can now apply a new double-gradient style, allowing you to create more visually dynamic and engaging bars by blending two gradients seamlessly.
Additionally, we’ve introduced the ability to remove the bar ends entirely, which results in a smoother and more continuous color flow, enhancing the overall aesthetic of your schedule.
New Feature: Have Symbols Change Automatically Based on Date, Column Text, etc.
In the Constraints and Actions sub-tab for a symbol, you can define various criteria to automatically change the symbol’s shape and color.
In this example, the symbol checks a specific column for certain text and updates accordingly if the text is found. This column data can also be imported from Excel or MS Project, allowing symbols to update automatically when needed.
Beyond comparing column text, you can set the symbol to change based on its position relative to specific dates or even in relation to another symbol on the schedule. You can reference the other symbol using either its Symbol Tag or Symbol Name.
Did you know that in Milestones Professional, you can already select All Symbols on your schedule or All Symbols of a Certain Type?
These options have always been available by right-clicking on a symbol.
Now, a new feature allows you to Select Symbols by Date Range, with an added option to limit the selection to only visible task rows—preventing accidental selection of hidden symbols.
This feature makes it easier to modify specific symbols on your schedule, whether you’re shifting task dates (using the Dates Tab) or overriding symbol colors (via Selection Tab > Size/Color Sub-tab).
You can now apply the Fade to Edge effect to individual task rows, giving you a new way to highlight specific tasks and make your schedule visually distinct. This feature is particularly useful for drawing attention to key tasks, phases, or milestones, ensuring that important elements stand out clearly at a glance.
To take it even further, you can combine this with our new Group Feature to create a custom legend. By grouping background highlights with legend entries and labels, you can provide clear explanations for the color coding or background effects applied to your task rows. This not only enhances the visual clarity of your schedule but also helps viewers quickly understand what the different highlights represent.
With these new options, you have more control over how your schedules look and communicate important information, making it easier than ever to deliver polished, professional presentations.
Improvement: Symbol Maker now has 10x the Resolution
The Milestones Professional 2025 release introduces major enhancements to symbol creation and placement, offering greater flexibility and precision.
The symbol maker now supports a significantly improved resolution of 400×400, a tenfold increase from the previous 40×40 resolution, enabling users to design and use high-quality, detailed symbols. Additionally, users can now move any selected point on the grid with ease, either by dragging it with the mouse or using keyboard controls for fine-tuned adjustments.
To ensure compatibility and ease of use, the new high-resolution symbols can seamlessly co-exist alongside symbols created with the lower resolution, preserving the integrity of existing projects while allowing for richer visual customization.