One of the main responsibilities of a PM is to report regularly project relevant information. This could be the project’s current state, cost forecasts, current balance between budget and actual costs to name just a few. When you use Merlin for project management on Mac OS X, there are various ways to create these reports out of your Merlin projects:
- You may export your project as a CSV file to drop in a spreadsheet and calculate further using the planned, expected, and actual values.
- Export into iCal files (ics) and have your project events transferred into calendar applications.
- You can also go the obvious way: File > New report… and select one of the report templates Merlin offers*
Just another possibility you might not know by now, is…
- To select your Merlin columns, Â copy them as rich text and paste into a text editor (like Pages.app, TextEdit.app, or even Mail.app)
You will see your columns with their contents pasted and layouted in a table:
_
*) Watch a movie at YouTube showing report creation
Is it possible to change to logo. I would like to change the Merlin log with my companies logo.
Is it possible have a report with all resources expected cost on it?
thank you.
Hi Christian,
to change the logo in the reports, just drop the logo of your company into the project’s icon (File > Project Settings > Misc pane)
To report the expected costs of your resources, just switch to the utilization view, enable the display of the ‘expected cost’ column, select your rows, and Copy as Rich text as described in this post.
Best regards, Vicky
One annoying behavior of the HTML export (and other export options) is the way it handles navigating folders.
There isn’t a way to overwrite an existing report. I export an HTML report to a shared network drive every week. However, I have to manually delete the folder it goes into everytime.
This is because Merlin automatically creates a new folder named whatever is in the ‘Export to’ field of the dialog box. And if you try to type in the existing folder name, instead of overwriting that folder with a newer report, it will drill into that folder and create a new folder within that one with the same name as the enclosing folder (assuming you keep the same name)!
So, everytime I export, I have to go into the folder, delete last week’s folder and re-export. If I mis-type the name of lst week’s folder (and so on), everyone who has a bookmark to the report won’t be able to access it until I correct the folder name.
I understand your point, and forward it as a feature request to the management.
Things are easier if you don’t rename Merlin’s suggestion for the name of the exported folder.
So, lets say you’ve exported once into HTML and now you choose to export again, keep the folder name suggestion and simply select the folder which should contain it. Merlin will notice that a folder by this name already exists and it will prompt a dialogue asking you whether to “Replace” the folder or not.
Best regards, Vicky
Pingback: Merlin – Modifying existing reports » MacPM
Hi Vicky,
I have question – is it possible to export utilization in any form? Rich text is not working as it copy only names and dates – but resource conflict is not exportable…
Hi Feodor,
you would like to export the Gantt chart of the utilization view? This is exportable as an image; File > Export > Image > …
Another option would be to call the print dialogue and save the view (outline along with Gantt) as PDF; File > Print > PDF > Save as single page PDF
Best regards, Vicky
Pingback: Merlin – Modifying existing reports | MacPM