[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

[Lizard]

Excel can read CSV files, so if you export to CSV, others could open the list of tasks, durations, etc. in Excel. However, OmniPlan does not have a way to neatly merge changes back in from a CSV or Excel file. So you might be better off exporting to a PDF, JPEG or HTML Report, and distributing that. Those formats are read-only, but allow others to see the Gantt chart as well as the textual information. When changes are required, make them directly to the original OmniPlan file.

In terms of managing multiple magazines...
1) We have lots of users requesting better handling of multiple projects (especially with shared resources across projects) in a single file. We've got this on the 'to do' list for a future release.
2) If the various magazines have separate staff, it may be easier to maintain them as separate files.
3) If you want to see how all tasks for different magazines interact on one Gantt chart, and especially if people (or physical resources) need to be shared across multiple magazines, you'll need to put them all in one file.
Each magazine could be a top-level task, which can be collapsed and expanded to hide and show its specific tasks as needed.