As of August 26, 2016, macpm.net (the blog about Merlin 2 and project management on mac) has been discontinued. Feel free to check our new blog about the current Merlin products and project management on mac or iOS devices here.
Category Archives: Merlin How To…
Applescript – Transfer selected activities to Reminders
To transfer the scheduling of your Merlin project as events in Calendar.app or reminders in the Reminder.app you have two options: you can export or publish to iCal.
Exporting and publishing to iCal work for users of OS X Lion and earlier with iCal. For users of OS X Mountain Lion and newer they transfer to Apple’s Calendar.app and Reminders.app
To be more specific Merlin exports or syncs the complete project, and/or the resource assignments whereby if you choose to
- convert dates to All day events or those with times, the activities will be transferred as events in local calendars in the Calendar.app
- convert dates as todos, the activities will be listed in the Reminders.app
We have had however some support requests wanting to know how to export/sync just a selection or a subset of activities. Our answer is, there is no explicit function in Merlin exporting the selection, but you may of course right click the specific project structures, call “Save selection†out of the contextual menu, open the newly created project and export to iCal as todos.
If you want to do this by script, please read further. Continue reading
Merlin to Project 2013 – exchanging files
To exchange Merlin project files with MS Project users of contemporary versions, choose File > Export > MS Project > XML
Project 2013 users open the thus exported XML MS Project files as follows:
– Click the ‘File’ tab,
– Click ‘New’ on the left side of the Project window.
– Choose ‘New from existing project’
– Switch from ‘Projects’ to ‘XML Format’ Continue reading
Merlin: plan by work or duration
Now and then we get asked in support, when to plan Merlin activities by work and when by duration.
Some pose their question a bit differently, they define the activity’s work, assign two or more resources on it and email us to ask why the activity’s duration got shorter.
When using Merlin to plan your projects, there are various planing scenarios. You will find some basic configuration examples with details and screenshots here.
When it comes to the point where you assign activities to resources, it helps to know, that there is a project setting called ‘resources share their work’ which is enabled by default. You will find it under File > Project Settings > Misc > Resources >
As long as this setting is enabled on your project, whenever you assign two resources to the same task, their work would be 50% of the work defined on the activity each so the activity itself would take half the time to be accomplished.
There are cases where you need this, for example: two painters paint the same wall on half of the time.
There are cases however where you don’t need this. You have a training planned for 1 day and have two trainers. The training won’t stop at midday, both of the trainers will be there for the complete day.
To plan this activity, you simply define it by duration and blank work entries on the activity and assignments.
Licensing Merlin – for Gmail or other users checking emails on a web browser
When asking your emails over the web browser (so you are not using a mail app client on your Mac like Mail.app for example) you need to first save your Merlin licence file on your Mac to be able to use it in a second step to license your Merlin application.
Following screencast shows those actions and uses a gmail account as example…
