Tag Archives: Applescript

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 →

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 →

Merlin – AppleScript installer for custom report templates

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We have a series of posts explaining how to create and modify custom report templates. You will find there descriptions on how to write report code and of course installation instructions for the offered custom templates.

That is, you download and extract the provided zip. Place the contained mrept package under the following path of your mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Merlin/Reports. In case you have no “Reports” folder please create it first and pay attention to name it exactly as “Reports”. Restart your Merlin and call File > New Report… to find the new report listed.

Or… you can use an AppleScript we’ve just wrote checking for the “Reports” folder, asking you to locate the report template (mrept file package) and installing it automatically into the correct path.

To start it for the first time after extracting it from the zip: Right click it, select to ‘open’ and click again on ‘open’.

To use it: Just drag an mrept report template onto it.

Downloadables: ‘InstallCustomReportTemplate.zip

 

 

Applescript – Merlin to Evernote

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AppleScriptMerlin integrates easily with lots of other Mac and Windows applications. You can import, export, sync but also use applescript to connect between applications.

We’ve posted an Evernote > Merlin applescript in the past. It allows you to select notes in Evernote and import them to Merlin as file attachments to be able to view them offline and have them as part of your Merlin project.

This script is for those of you who want to transfer activities from Merlin to Evernote and create notes from an existing Merlin project. It goes throughout all activities of the top most opened project, checks if they already been synced to Evernote, if not it creates a note in related Evernote notebook, and writes there the content of the notes, names the note as the Merlin task, set expected end date of the task as creation date for the note (so one can check for it) and writes into Merlin project in the ‘additional title’ column the id of the note in Evernote in order for the script to be able to identify duplicates by re-transfers.

We don’t see how we can overwrite existing note content by applescript, so we tell the script to report existing notes and not to change them.

Feel free to download this Merlin to Evernote applescript and modify the sample as you find fitting your workflow needs at best.

(*
	This script goes throught all activities of the top most opened project, checks if they already been synced to Evernote, if not it creates a note in related Evernote notebook, and writes there the content of the notes, names the note as the Merlin task, set expected end date of the task as creation date for the note (and also as subject's date). 
	Written by Vicky Stamatopoulou
	For ProjectWizards
	Jun 3, 2013
*)

Continue reading →

Things to Merlin – Transfer selected todos to Merlin on another mac

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We have posted information for transferring activities from Merlin to Things and todos from Things to Merlin. Mentioned approaches require both applications (Merlin and Things) to be installed on the same mac.

But… how to proceed if you want to transfer your data to another Mac where you may have installed Merlin, or when wanting to forward to a PM using Merlin? By a similar approach.

Just use another AppleScript we specifically wrote, which reads the selected todos from Things and writes in a Merlin XML file, which you can open in Merlin by drag&drop. For an easy file transfer, the script creates an email message and attaches the Merlin file.  Cool, isn’t?

Installation:

  • Just download the applescript
  • Expand the zip archive
  • Install the contained AppleScripts into the ‘Things Scripts’ directory
    /Users/[your user name]/Library/Containers/com.culturedcode.things/Data/Library/Application Support/Cultured Code/Things Scripts/
  • Restart your Things

Preparation:

    Work in Things. Create todos in Things and name them. Add on those todos, if required, due dates, tags, notes and may click the todos to define that they are completed

Workflow:

  1. Start your Things and view your todos
  2. Select the todos to be transferred
  3. Call the script “Things > Mail > Merlin” from the scripts menu of Things
  4. Enter the email address of the recipient in the mail message which is automatically created in Mail.app and contains a Merlin-XML file
  5. Send the mail message.
  6. As the recipient of this mail… Drag the XML file as displayed in the email message onto the activities area of an opened Merlin project.

Result:

    The todos will be inserted as activities in the Merlin project.