Tag Archives: Planned Date

Merlin – Moving Elements on Gantt in the timeline

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Merlin keeps track of the following three kind of values: planned, expected and actual.

You can enter planned and actual values, expected values will be automatically calculated by Merlin. When you have a task and you enter a given planned earliest start in the inspector or the according column, you place your task on a specific start date in the time line.

Move not started activities:

If you move the Gantt chart element of a not yet started activity, Merlin will understand that you are changing the planned values, and adjusts the given planned earliest start date accordingly.


Move activities in progress: Continue reading →

Merlin – default activity scheduling

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I want to start new tasks in an ongoing project on the current date, though cannot find a simple way to do this.

A new activity has per default no start date in Merlin.
Its planing depends on where you insert it within the Merlin project.

  • If you insert it as a sub activity into an activities group, it will be pushed to start at the start of the activities group, due to the group’s scheduling.
  • If you insert it in on top level of your project, your new activity will start either on the project’s start date,

OR in case you have enabled dynamic shifting in the Project settings, it will be pushed to the status date (status date is today, in case you hadn’t set it)

  • If you insert an activity and link it by finish to start to a predecessor, the newly inserted activity will be pushed accordingly.

NOTE: In none of those cases the given planned start date will be explicitly entered, the activity will only be pushed to an expected date because it cannot start earlier due to the parent activity, predecessor, or dynamic shifting of the project.

To access the project settings:
File > Project Settings…

Merlin: Expected dates

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set planned earliest start dateOne of the questions coming up in support now and then, is how to change expected or planned start dates in a project.  I have to admit I was a bit puzzled the first time I was confronted to this question. Being someone who simply loves to use inspectors and palettes I could not understand why would anyone really try and edit the values in the columns ‘planned start’ or ‘expected start’, when there is the ‘plan’ tab of the inspector.

So I suggested  to simply use the plan inspector and define there the desired dates instead.

In the meanwhile I understand that editing the values in the columns could be sometimes quicker than clicking the row first, switch to the inspector, select a date, click on the next activity row, back in the inspector, next date, etc…

So if you prefer editing the starting dates for your activities simply enable the display of the column ‘Given Planned Earliest Start’ and define the dates there. The columns ‘Expected Start’ and ‘Planned Start’ are calculated values, therefor not editable by the user.

Continue reading →