Category Archives: Merlin How To…

Merlin – Do a little bit of magic in Merlin reports – part XXVII

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Those of you who do project management with Merlin on your Mac and have checked our post series explaining how to create custom templates for Merlin reports, know by now…

Now let’s do some magic with the reports.

Classic Report with optional WBS-Code

When wanting to report all kinds of aspects of your actual project, you usually call File  > New Report > Classic report.

In case you want to modify the report so that it outputs the WBS-Code in its tables of milestones, overdue/upcoming/overdue tasks, or elements, you would need to create an option whether or not the ‘WBS-Code’ column should be outputted and insert optionally the wbs code where required.

To make a long story short, we’ve created a new set of such a classic report and post it hereafter.

Please remember: Custom Merlin reports we provide as templates, can be downloaded and used for free. Furthermore, you may modify and distribute as you like and find appropriate. Continue reading →

Merlin – when to enter an actual start when updating a task

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When managing a project with Merlin on your Mac you create your tasks and assign them to your resources. As your resources work on their tasks, you as a PM usually update your Merlin project by entering actual values and record progress.

There are various ways to record progress on your tasks:

  1. You use the ‘Actuals’ inspector
  2. You enter the completion % in the ‘plan’ inspector
  3. You enter the completion % in the according column in the outline.
  4. You select a completion % in the according sub menu of the context menu you get, when you right click a task.

Should you go for the first approach…
You enter first the actual start date and then the progress by entering the percentage of completed work or the absolute work done as explained here.

If you choose to directly enter the progress on the task (without defining an actual start date), Merlin assumes the actual start was the same as the planned start and enters this date as actual start.

Should there be a difference between the planned and actual start of the task, a grey Gantt element will be shown in addition (for the planned values).

Should you go for approach 2, 3 or 4…
Merlin assumes (as explained above) that the actual start was the same as the planned start and enters this date as actual start.

Continue reading →

Merlin iOS app – enter actuals to record progress and update your Merlin projects

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When managing a project with Merlin on your Mac you create your tasks and assign them to your resources. As your resources work on their tasks, you as a PM usually update your Merlin project by entering actual values and record progress.

Merlin user on an iOS device:

As a Merlin user editing a shared Merlin project on the iOS device with Merlin iOS app, you tap the i button of a task, switch to the ‘Actuals‘ and tap on ‘Edit‘… Depending on what you want to log, you enter actuals in ‘percentage‘ or ‘absolute‘ mode.

    Use percentage, when the total work expected for this task matches the planned entry. Means, you entered 3 planned days, you expect the task to be done within 3 planned days, and have currently a 25% progress to record.

    watch movie

    Use absolute, when the total work expected for this task does not match the planned entry. Means, you had 5 planned days, but after having worked for 4 days onto this task you realize that it really needs 3 more days.

    If the task is completed, enter the correct amount of actual work for the task, for example 7 days in the ‘normal‘ field and enter 0 days in the ‘remaining work’ field.

    watch movie

Merlin user on Mac update their progress thus.

 

 

Merlin – Do a little bit of magic in Merlin reports – part XXVI

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Those of you who do project management with Merlin on your Mac and have checked our post series explaining how to create custom templates for Merlin reports, know by now…

Now let’s do some magic with the reports.

Format dates in ‘Information report’, ‘Next Due Activities’ and ‘Review Report’ as dd/mm/yyy

Above report templates are XSLT based reports. This technology does not allow them to ask the date format on your Mac, so dates are hard coded as (mm/dd/yyyy) which is correct if you are US based.

If you however want to format dates as dd/mm/yyy you would need to edit all those report.xslt files and modify the dateformatter from “‘[M01]/[D01]/[Y]'” …Report.xslt-DateFormatter

to “‘[D01]/[M01]/[Y]'”.

To make a long story short, we’ve created a new set of those three reports and post it hereafter.

Continue reading →

Applescript – Calculate expected cost in two currencies

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When you plan your projects with Merlin for Mac, you will find lots of autocalculating columns helping you in accomplishing your goal.

Take the ‘Expected costs‘ column for example. It calculates expected costs by adding automatically expected work costs (due to assignments and resource prices), element costs and  base costs.

The project’s currency is a project setting and can be found or changed in File > Project Settings > General > Financial > Currency Symbol.

Should you need the same costs in an additional currency, you may enable ‘Expected Costs’ in the outline, copy the rows, paste in Excel, Numbers or a similar party application, and let the third party application calculate the costs in a second currency according to the current exchange rate.

However… to those visiting this pages from time to time should not come as a surprise,  that we’ve wrote a script accomplishing this in Merlin. Feel free to use and share as find appropriate 🙂

 

(*     Scripting with Merlin 2

    You may incorporate this ProjectWizards sample code into your program(s) without
    restriction.  This ProjectWizards sample code has been provided "AS IS" and the
    responsibility for its operation is yours.  You are not permitted to
    redistribute this ProjectWizards sample code as "ProjectWizards sample code" after having
    made changes.  If you're going to redistribute the code, we require
    that you make it clear that the code was descended from ProjectWizards sample
    code, but that you've made changes.

    Copyright ® 2013 ProjectWizards, Melle, Germany. All rights reserved.

    This script goes throught all activities of the top most opened project, asks for the project currency, the foreign currency, the exchange rate (proposes a link of a service outputting this information), calculates expected costs based on expected work, element and base costs of each item in the foreign currency, and writes this value in the 'Additional title' column. 

     Applescript restrictions allow this script neither to retrieve for the project's currency, nor define a custom column title to 'Additional title', or define a right alignment of the same column. Those actions are to be done by the Merlin user in the respective dialogues.

    Written by Vicky Stamatopoulou
    For ProjectWizards
    Sept 4, 2013

    Copyright © for the 'Trim' function belongs to the late Jürgen Schell · http://www.j-schell.de

*)

property NeedAProjectMessage : "You must have an open project in order to run this script"

property BaseCurrencyTitle : "Base currency"
property BaseCurrency : "Please select your project's base currency."
property DefaultCurrencyString : "USD"
 Continue reading →