[skwirl]

Hi zealousagenda,

I apologize for the frustration you're experiencing with OmniPlan. We may or may not have a version that solves the problems you mentioned in time for your wedding (I'm assuming your wedding is coming up sooner rather than later), but we're definitely aware of these issues/feature requests and are actively working on them.

Originally Posted by zealousagenda

First of all, the scale for viewing and printing the Gantt chart is too small. We need to be able to view our "project" on an hour-by-hour basis. For example, the eight-minute task of the "Bride & Father Dance" looks like a 1 pixel wide sliver, which is ultimately useless. If tasks can be assigned in the order of minutes (and even seconds), then the Gantt chart view should allow us to view the project with a scale of hours. (We have some 1-hour periods of our wedding where 8 or more resources are all performing separate, overlapping, and simultaneous tasks, so of course we need to look at a project with a finer scale.)

This is a popular request among our users. The "support for smaller time scales" feature has been approved, and will be implemented in a later version of OmniPlan.

Next, it looks like a hellish mess when we print it out. MS Project and other apps provide a nice, neat, precise printout. Given my past successes with OmniGraffle, I expected so much more, and I received so much less that what would be acceptable. Additionally, there is no method for adjusting the margins of the printout.

To adjust the margins of the printout, you need to go to 'File' > 'Print' and select 'OmniPlan' from the print settings drop-down menu. You can also adjust the header/footer, dimensions and content settings here too. We know of some printing issues in OmniPlan 1.1 and are trying to address them in OmniPlan 1.2. I'm interested in hearing more about the specific issues you've encountered, if you wouldn't mind emailing them to omniplan@omnigroup.com that would be very helpful.

Finally, the inability to define specific start and end dates for the ENTIRE project that are not variable sinks this product. For a wedding, the timeframe is set--I do not want the app to think for me because we know when all of the scheduled planning and preparation must begin, and we know when the entire event ends. Having a floating project end is a nice option, but a set project end is more realistic. Constraints should be user-defined first for the entire project, and then for the individual tasks, with the scale for viewing the Gantt chart based on the constraints of the whole project.

I will file a feature request for a way to set a project end date along with your comments. Currently, the end date of the project is based on the end date of the last item in the project. What you could do is create a milestone named "End of Event" and set an end constraint for it. Then, have all the top level tasks in your project connected to the milestone with a finish to start dependency connection.

Does this info help? If you would like to request a refund, please let me know at omniplan@omnigroup.com and I will start the refund process ASAP. :-)