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Msft Project?

R

Raesu

Member
I was wondering if anyone had some opinions on this software. I'm looking to use it for organizing campaigns throughout the year in different areas, but using the trial I'm finding the software is actually pretty complicated even for someone comfortable with Excel.


Any reviews? Should I brush up on how to make gantt charts in excel? I've seen that they don't look great and are a bit limited. Thanks.
 
I have, and currently use it occasionally. I think part of the problem is that it was orginally built by another company and then was bought by Microsoft, so there's a sort of mesh of user interfaces. Whereas in XL you can set things up and then make changes later, Project is more "you know what you're doing when you set things up" and then runs from there. This makes it a little harder to learn as it's tricky to correct mistakes, but it is far more powerful (imo) at building time based project schedules and showing correct durations. Especially when you start dealing with projects that have 100+ tasks in them.


If your need is small, I'd say stick with XL and learn how to the some chart tricks. If you're doing a lot of project estimates/time estimates, or have a lot of tasks within a project, I'd recommend using MS Project.
 
Answered my question perfectly, thanks. I'll dig into some gantt charts in excel although it looks tricky!
 
I just finished a Gantt chart spreadsheet based on a project run hourly as opposed to daily. I needed more granularity, and less detail about resources.


I'd suggest you look in to Chandoo's "conditional formatting" links, and probably buy his project management package, although much of the basics are freely distributed around the site here. You could do worse than to search this site for "Gantt"
 
It is a professional grade solution. It is neither simple nor cheap.


Have a look at this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openproj/
 
Dan_l,


I started with that one for my hourly Gantt needs. I had all kinds of problems trying to get very simple data entered. I had two one-day tasks, and when I added a third, the Open Project files kept trying to change my dates for the other two tasks to meet some internal criteria that were hidden from me. That software has a lot of internal problems still to be sorted.


But the price certainly makes one prefer it over MS Project.


Don
 
Ohhh yeah: it's definitely not perfect. But there's a lot of folks out there who buy MS Project for the sake of buying MS project. I think a retail license is about 500 bucks. I don't know what your corporate licensing cost is, but mine i still pretty high.


Conversely, my needs from project software is still pretty remedial. So I just offer the FOSS solution. Some people forget about us freetards :)
 
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