[sunshine]

Project Management bores the pants off me. Basically, I suffer it for eight hours per day as it pays me more than I need for a comfortable living. Within the working life of a bored PM one of my real hates is the corporate love and reliance of Microsoft products. This love affair forces me to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Project. Excel and PowerPoint I can just about suffer, Word I truly hate, but Project... don't get me started on it...

I've been fiddling OmniPlan for a few days now and, apart from quirks to be ironed out, I think it has fabulous potential. I've read about the lack of core functionality and I agree, but this app offers something very important that has been missing for a very long time. Usability.

I use a Wacom tablet with my Mac. The ease and elegance with which the OmniPlan gantt chart can be manipulated with a pen and tablet is astounding. I even managed to get non project literate, gantt chart hating team members to take an interest in this. Absolutely amazing.

I truly believe that OmniPlan has a lot to offer. It has the potential to massively reduce training time, update and review time and to make me a bit happier as I put up with the day job. There is real potential here with such a fresh innovative approach. Sure it's far from perfect, but I for one want to really encourage the ongoing development of an application that is serving a complex and fickle market while catering for immature project teams.

[mpoulalion]

I am relatively new to project management. I have been an art director and creative manager for the past 15 years.

I am now charged with migrating and training a magazine publishing company from Quark to InDesign. We have about 42 magazines all over the country.

I was encouraged to manually make a gant chart in excel but, like you, dispize microsoft and hate the idea of manually doing anything that can be more automated.

The only reason I would consider doing this in excell is to have a way for others to edit as needed. Plus, I don't want to get lost in the learning curve. I don't see a way to export this to excel.

I also don't see a way to have tabs so I could show each magazine as well as an over view. Sounds like that should be a sep. file for each magazine.

Thanks,
mp

[skwirl]

For those of you just tuning in, mpoulalion's post was answered in this thread:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3379