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Hello everyone,

I'm the CEO of a small (five person) company and we're currently looking for project-management software that is 1) not a bajillion dollars like MS Project, and 2) Mac-friendly. I downloaded a 1-day license of Omniplan and spent the day entering all of the scheduling data corresponding to one of our projects. After a good five hours of entering data and setting dependencies, I have to say that I think the GUI is super pretty, and a fair bit more usable than Project.

(A brief aside. It is much easier to set up dependencies in Project...you can simply type in the ID number of the prerequisites or dependencies of a task next to the task's name in the task list. In my Omniplan task list, I grouped the tasks by department instead of chronologically, and I had a hard time using the graphical interface to assign prerequisites to a task that followed the task in the task list. After a fair bit of experimentation I discovered that I could draw arrows from the lower task in the list [the prerequisite] to the higher task in the list [the dependency]. But what I really wanted to do was just type in the ID of the task's prerequisite into the Task: Dependencies window. That would have been SO much easier.)

Anyway, I'm having some difficulty finding the obvious "next step". Now that I have all of this data organized in Omniplan, what is the easiest way to view it in a usable format? In the Gantt view, I can only really get a good idea of what's going on if I zoom out to the month or quarter level, and no matter what zoom level I'm at the task names aren't listed.

The Project Calendar in the Calendar view would be perfect if it only the tasks were listed on the dates they're scheduled to be completed. Then I could just print out each employee's calendar for the week/month and hand it to them. As it is, the Calendar view seems pretty useless -- it's only function is to set the work hours of the company and individual resources, and you really don't need such a fancy interface for doing that. (This issue has been brought up in other forum posts.)

What I really want is an easy way to see all of the tasks assigned to a specific resource, in chronological order, that I can just print out and hand to them. From reading someone else's forum posts I figured out I can export an Omniplan file filtered to show tasks from a specific resource, and by manipulating the view options on the Task View I can see a list of all of their assigned tasks, including each task's scheduled start and end dates. But as I mentioned before, the tasks aren't entered in chronological order, and so this isn't really a useful thing to give to someone -- they'd have to closely examine the list to figure out which task has the earliest start date, and this is VERY cumbersome when you've got a task list that's several hundred items long. Furthermore, why do I have to go through the extract process to get this data? Isn't coming up with employee "To Do" lists the whole point of project-management software? Why can't I just easily see this data in the Resource View? When I click on a resource in the Resource View I should get a choice between viewing a Gantt chart or viewing a chronological list of their tasks. (In Project, you can click on a person's name and get a task list.)

The only work-around I've found so far is to export all the tasks for a specific resource to an Omniplan file, then export that to an HTML file, then manually edit the html so that all the tasks are in chronological order. This is VERY cumbersome. Is there an easier way to get a chronological "To Do" list for my employees?

Last edited by seema; 2007-07-15 at 05:03 PM..
 
 


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