Omniplan fixed end dates and flexible tasks
 

Hello there,

I work at a school that in 18 months time is due to move to a new building, and I have been looking at Omniplan (that I bought some time ago) as a way of planning the things we as a school staff need to complete. I am however finding it difficult to use and wonder whether it is in fact the right type of program for what I am trying to do (I also have OF, OG and OO).

What I wish to do is add a number of projects that we need to start and end within a particular time frame (for example "Make arrangements for new library", "Produce Commemorative Edition of School Newspaper", "Identify science areas") and to which I can assign different members of staff and sort out dependancies. However, due to the nature of our job, the time we spend in moving these projects on will vary a lot, and we need to work on them around our other commitments of teaching, talking to parents and so on).

What I need is a simple way in which to put hard beginning and end dates to the projects (so that it appears clearly on the Gantt chart), put the different tasks within these projects, make assignments and a rough idea of how much time we should be spending on each and put it up in the staffroom so that everyone can have a clear overview!

I'm sorry if this is obvious to the more experienced of you put even after reviewing the tutorial I am struggling with it. I did look at the trial version of Merlin and found I could do this easily by using "precise" beginning and end dates. I then thought that I could import what I had done back into OP to give me an idea of what I was doing wrong. When the file was imported however the end dates had changed. I can't afford to buy Merlin and wish to stick with Omni if possible.

Any help would be very welcome, and thanks for reading this far!

If you open up the " inspector " on a task [shft-cmd-I]
In the second one down " task information " , make sure you choose the first icon in the row and you'll see for both " start " and " end " there are " constraints " available that you can assign. That should do what you want .
When task is going to miss it's constraint on either end , you'll get a notification stop sign warning you next to the task , and it will offer some possible steps to take to resolve the problem . Hope that helps . : )

Thanks very much for this ext555, I appreciate your time.

I have used the constraints with one of the projects (that is also a group that contains a variety of subtasks). This puts a fine black line up to the date I want - do you know if there is a way to make this more visible?

In addition, I can't find a way to set an end date for the whole project (that is, when the build is complete and we have to move in) - does anyone know how this can be achieved?

Thanks again.

Create a milestone, set a constraint on the milestone as described by ext555, then create a finish->start dependency from the final task to the milestone.

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;88114]Create a milestone, set a constraint on the milestone as described by ext555, then create a finish->start dependency from the final task to the milestone.[/QUOTE]

Thanks very much for your help, it was of assistance. After working with this a little more I do feel part of what I'm looking for is the ability to de-couple effort and duration. I have put a post about it in the relevant thread.