Using Timeline Zoom to Plan a Week or a Day

Zoom on the EDGEBIC Gantt is not cosmetic; it is how you match the view to the decision you are making. A month on the screen answers capacity questions: is the plant overloaded, is a due date at risk, where does a job collide with a busy machine. A single day answers dispatch questions: what runs on this machine this shift, and exactly when. Same schedule, same bars, different resolution. EDGEBIC by User Solutions gives you both from one chart, so you plan the month and dispatch the day without ever leaving the Gantt.

This post explains the three navigation controls that reshape the view, when to reach for each, and how to move between the week and the day without losing your place. For the full reading guide, see the visual scheduling guide.

Three Controls, Three Jobs

The Gantt has three navigation moves, and they do different things. Confusing them is the most common source of "my schedule looks wrong" that turns out to be a view setting.

• Zoom changes how much time each column of the chart represents. Zoom in and a column becomes an hour or a shift, so you read fine detail across a few days. Zoom out and a column becomes a day or more, so you read many days at a glance but lose the fine timing. Right-click an empty area of the Gantt for Timescale Zoom In and Timescale Zoom Out, or use the toolbar zoom control.
• Horizon changes how far the visible window reaches. Horizon End Later and Horizon Start Earlier each add or remove a month from the range, growing or shrinking the total span you can scroll across.
• Today re-anchors the window so today is the first visible column, without touching your zoom or your filters.

Zoom is resolution. Horizon is reach. Today is a jump home. Keep those straight and the Gantt always shows what you meant it to.

Planning the Week and the Month

Capacity questions are wide questions. Can we take this rush order without blowing three others; is the mill overloaded next week; is anything drifting past its due date. To answer them you need many jobs and many days on the screen at once, and that means zooming out and extending the horizon.

Zoom out until each column is a day or more, then use Horizon End Later once or twice to pull future work into view. Now the whole load is visible: full lanes stand out, gaps stand out, and a job whose bars creep past its promised date is a shape you can see rather than a number you have to look up. At this resolution you are not reading exact start times, and you should not try to. You are reading the shape of the plan.

This wide view is where the override-and-warn workflow starts. You spot the collision at the month level, then zoom in to fix it precisely.

Dispatching the Day

Dispatch is a narrow question. What does this machine run this shift, and when does each operation start. A month view cannot answer it, because a whole day is a sliver of a column and start times are unreadable.

Click Today to bring the present to the front, then zoom in until each column is a shift or an hour. Now the bars are wide enough to read: you can see that the mill runs job A from 08:00, job B from 10:30, and job C after lunch, in order, on the exact machine. On the Job View tab you get an even more explicit control, a View selector offering Hour, Day, Week, or Month, so you can set the timescale directly to match the shift you are dispatching.

At this resolution the caption text on each bar earns its place. Turn on the tokens for start time and hours and each bar becomes a work order line a supervisor can act on. Reading those fields is covered in reading operation description fields on a Gantt bar.

Matching Zoom to the Decision

The rule is one sentence: zoom tight for what runs today, wide for whether the plan holds. Here is the mapping planners settle into.

None of these are separate screens. They are the same Gantt, and moving between them is two or three clicks. That is the point: the decision changes through the day, and the view changes with it.

The Job View Timescale Controls

The Job View tab, the one-job cockpit, gives you the timescale as an explicit control rather than a zoom gesture. Its View selector sets the strip directly to Hour, Day, Week, or Month, so you pick the resolution by name instead of clicking in and out. There is also a Show as Hours toggle that changes how the strip renders the work, and a Show selector that changes the row detail level.

The practical value is precision when you are focused on one job. On the whole-plant Schedule View you zoom by feel to get the density you want. On the Job View you often know exactly what you need: a Day view to walk a job's next few operations with a supervisor, or a Month view to see a long job's whole arc. Naming the timescale is faster than nudging it, and because the two surfaces answer different questions, it makes sense that they expose the timescale differently. Reach for the Job View's named views when the job, not the plant, is the subject.

A Worked Example: One Planner, One Morning

At Acme Industries a planner runs the floor from a single Gantt.

At 7:30 the planner opens the Schedule View, clicks Today, and zooms in to a shift-level resolution. Each machine's lane now reads as a clean sequence of the day's operations with start times on the bars. The planner filters to the three jobs due this week, prints each supervisor their machine's run, and the floor knows what to do before the first shift starts.

At 10:00 a rush order arrives. The planner zooms out to a day-level view, extends the horizon a month with Horizon End Later, and sees the whole load. The rush job's milling step collides with a machine that is already full next Tuesday. The planner drags the colliding operation to a lighter machine, watches the downstream bars flag amber, and stages the change. Because the wide view showed the collision and the free capacity together, the fix took seconds.

At the Monday meeting the same planner zooms out further, to a week per column across three months, and walks the group through capacity: two machines running hot, one job drifting toward its due date, room for the rush order that just landed. Nobody opens a second tool. The month and the day came from the same chart.

One Chart, Every Altitude

A dispatch list is fixed at one altitude: it tells you the next few jobs and nothing about the month. A capacity report is fixed at the other: it tells you the month and nothing you can hand a supervisor. The Gantt is the only surface that flies at both, and zoom is the throttle. User Solutions has been building schedules manufacturers can read since 1991, for shops of every size and for names like BAE Systems and the US Navy, and the ability to plan the month and dispatch the day from one picture is a large part of why planners trust the picture at all.

Set the zoom to the question and the Gantt answers it. Bring your busiest week to a demo and we will plan it at every altitude together. Give US a chance to show you the same schedule from a month away and an hour close.