Hi, this is me Perri…

the other day, as I was looking in the menus for the short cut toggling the display of the elements area, I found a cool feature
of Merlin. If you call ‘Window’ > ‘New Window’ you will get another window of the current project, which gives you the possibility to have different views of your project displayed simultaneously. I often use for example the Merlin’s ‘Resources’ view. I  find it very practical when choosing which resource should be assigned to a specific activity, because of the additional information I get through the various columns displayed. Until now, I would switch the view from ‘Activities’ to ‘Resources’, decide which resource fits to my needs, notice its name, change back  to the ‘Activities’ view, right click my activity, and select the appropriate resource under the ‘assignments’ submenu.

Long story isn’t? Here is how I can do it from now on…

If I want for example to assign the cheapest employee to a specific activity and want to choose among all these having the appropriate role, I can open another ‘New Window’ of my Merlin project, change to the ‘Resources’ view, sort by ‘Role’ and check the entries in the column ‘Standard Rate’.

Now I can select the tittle of the appropriate resource and assign it by drag & drop onto the activity displayed in the ‘Activities’ view of the other window of the same Merlin project.

If I want to make sure I am really using the cheapest resource I can use the advance search feature, define a search filter for the appropriate role and sort the resulting resources by ‘Standard Rate’.

Merlin’s single-window-concept is pretty cool, but sometimes two of these windows can be twice as good 🙂