Merlin – Master projects

With Merlin you can do schedules of your projects. You assign tasks to your resources, enter financial information (costs, budget), record issues, risks, attach files with additional information, update actual work, see scheduling warnings, call reports and lots more when working with the separate project files.

Should you manage more than one project at a time and assign your resources to more than one project, you need to coordinate their various assignments and make sure the resources are not over allocated. There is a concept for this in Merlin called… combining projects.
Combining projects is easy. Just call File > Combine Projects… and create a ‘master’ project file.

ScreenSnapz020When requiring to combine project shared by Merlin or Merlin Server, open those project files over “Remote Open”.

To save a ‘master’ project, just call File > Save As…

Working with master projects… Continue reading

Merlin: Project Settings for Combined Projects

If you wish to observe and manage multiple projects in one Gantt chart, you can combine them into one, Master, project. To do so in Merlin you can either use drag & drop or a menu command:

File > Combine Projects…

Once you have combined your projects we suggest you focus onto the ‘Utilization‘ view for detecting over-allocations.  All resources together with their assignments on all combined projects will be listed there.

Although the projects are combined now into one master file, the following issues need to be kept in mind.

  • Changes to each file will be saved back to the individual file
  • Each project has it own calendar, settings, resources and resources calendars
  • Dependencies that cross projects can not be created
  • If resources are used across multiple combined projects, you will see multiple instances of the same resource in the Resources View. This is expected behavior. Resources having the same name will be considered as ‘Master’ resources and their utilization for all assignments on all combined projects will be accumulated in Utilization view.

How to access Project Settings for Combined Projects?

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