Applescript – Transfer selected activities to Reminders

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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

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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’
MS Project Import 1– Switch from ‘Projects’ to ‘XML Format’ Continue reading →

Merlin – Feedback to the trial

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Alex Foerster shared in the Merlin Project International Facebook group

…OK. It is amazing. I’m just trying the demo. The look is great. The integrated one-window interface is great. The handling of the working hours. The handling of the exception days is great […] whow, easy to learn but powerful too!!!

Merlin: plan by work or duration

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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 >

ResourcesShareTheirWork

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.

ScheduledByDurationOnly