Re: I can't make hammock tasks work

Hi scabhead,

Interesting comment that I certainly agree with regarding the main Office
Suite. However, as an analagy, you won't be successful in using Excel if
you haven't been taught the underlying principles of arithmetic, and even
dummies have been taught something of these principles. With Project, you
need to know the underlying principles of Critical Path Analysis on which
Project is based, and, unfortunately, CPA is not taught in schools!
Prospective users thus have to learn it from scratch, and apply project
management techniques for which they haven't been trained. This applies to
all project management programmes and not just Microsoft Project. Learn the
techniques and Project becomes much more obvious, though it could be more
user friendly in a number of areas :) Finally, Project is primarily a
scheduelling package that computes the dates for you. Put in resources and
costs and the costs will also be calculated, but it is primarily a
scheduelling program.

Mike Glen
MS Project MVP
See http://tinyurl.com/2xbhc for Project Tutorials



I understand that Project is designed to really help you compute
costs and work and it looks like it is awesome for that. I am just
surprised that it is not a bit simpler for the quick-and-dirty crowd.
I will figure out the workarounds eventually. But just about every
other Office package seems to work for dummies. In Word, you don't
need to use paragraph styles in order to write a document. In
PowerPoint, you never have to touch the style master to be produce a
presentation. In Excel you can just start typing in numbers and away
you go. Of course, there is more power there should the user decide
to learn it. But the basic utility is there without having to try
and cheat the software. Even Access isn't rough in this regard. I
am just surprised at how much the user of Project has to shape his
head in order to use it.

That said, I suppose that other software packages might be out there
that would better do what I am targeting since I am scheduling rather
than computing work/cost. However, given that my spacecraft
customers mostly use Project and I use their files as a starting
point for my work, it helps to have commonality.

Thanks again though fellas.




.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Drop & Create Table - DTS Export to Excel
    ... Allan, ... That is to say that on the initial execution of the ... package, the data fell into place perfectly and as expected. ... if I open the Excel file and manualy delete all affected rows and ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.dts)
  • Re: Table trouble (multi-page, multi-colour)
    ... I've tried Excel2LaTeX and LaTable, but none of those programs do the ... You could format the column separators in Excel, ... you could also type row colour codes (see the ... For this you could consider the geometry package; ...
    (comp.text.tex)
  • Re: Distributed Access references
    ... understand from trying to package an app and working w/ ... Although it appears that the excel does get packaged by ... So my app relies on the user having their own ... As for the other references I am not sure what to do? ...
    (microsoft.public.access.devtoolkits)
  • RE: pricing database
    ... You obviously have a method for determining the price for both your ... Excel spreadsheet. ... you have to cover all of your costs - insurance ... the unit cost for the salary, and remove the calculation for fringe benefits ...
    (microsoft.public.excel.newusers)
  • Re: is access capable of building a cost calculator?
    ... currently i have one main file with all the costings in it, there are 5 different sheets, with costs from 5 different categories: Linehaul, Vehicle, Labour, Materials and Storage, most of these contains some base information and some calculations, some contain 2 different sets of base information and the same calculations in each column. ... then i have the "form" file, which the user uses, they input the parameters for which they want to produce the costs for, also hidden in this file is a couple of sheets with formulas and tests to formulate the correct pricing ... If you've taken the trouble to divide your Excel version into separate worksheets then you won't find this as hard as some do at first. ... Access adds to this a capability to build interactive forms and printable reports, with a rich programming language to add "business logic", so that you can have some action result from the click of a button, for example, or triggered by a change to a value. ...
    (microsoft.public.access.gettingstarted)
Quantcast