Tag Archives: Export

Applescript – Transfer selected activities to Reminders

Posted on by

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 – transferring selected structures to iCal

Posted on by

It’s been a long time ago, we’ve posted an applescript sample. The script for todays’ post was initiated by a user support request. The user knows that Merlin can export or sync project and resource calendars to iCal and already uses these options, however he sometimes need to export only some selected structures to iCal and was wondering how to do so.

One possible approach would be, to right click the specific project structures, call “Save selection” out of the contextual menu, open the newly created project and export to iCal.

Another approach may also be to write a script, similar to the ones we’ve written in the past for TimeLine 3D, Things or others, transferring just this selection.

Are you interested in the script solution? Great, here you are. Enjoy the script.

To find out how to place it into your File > Send To menu, please read here more

Merlin – Importing a checklist

Posted on by

Merlin is very powerful and sophisticated piece of project management software on MacOS X. It allows not only to attach checklist elements onto your projects, activities, activity groups or resources, but also supports  importing such lists created and saved by other applications. To import a checklist into your project just follow the next simple steps:

  1. Ask for a checklist saved in .opml format.
  2. Create a checklist element in your project; enable the display of elements area and add a new checklist element.
  3. Use the elements inspector and press the ‘import’ button.
  4. Select the .opml file with the checklist and you are done.

Wanting to forward  your checklist entries to someone not having Merlin? Simply use the export button and save in an .opml format, which can be opened by outline software.

You would like to transfer checklists from one project to another and wonder whether there is an easier way than export/import? Of course, just select the element in the elements area, copy, open your target project, select a position onto which you would like to checklist to get attached and paste.

Need a report of your currently selected checklist? Just click onto the ‘report’ button and see Merlin  creating the desired report containing just the selection.

You may want to watch the relevant video on YouTube.

Merlin: Reporting ways

Posted on by

Copy as Rich TextOne 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…

Continue reading →