I purchased OmniPlan believing that its ability to handle hours and minutes in its effort & duration calculations would make it the right product for my fiancee and I to use while planning our wedding day. I'm very sad to say that after entering in 100 tasks, OmniPlan is a huge disappointment. If you can help solve our problems, we would be grateful.
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.)
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.
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.
If you have solutions or workarounds for us, we would appreciate your help. Otherwise, we're left to believe that OmniPlan is all dressed up with no place to go, and that we need to request a refund for an app that fails to deliver an acceptable level of performance.
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.)
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.
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.
If you have solutions or workarounds for us, we would appreciate your help. Otherwise, we're left to believe that OmniPlan is all dressed up with no place to go, and that we need to request a refund for an app that fails to deliver an acceptable level of performance.
Threaded Mode