Merlin – Do a bit of magic in reports – Part IX

Those of you who have checked our new post series about “Merlin report templates” know by now…

Now let’s do some magic with the reports.


What if you want to report expected or actual resources’ work per phase?

We have used the report template as posted in this thread of Merlin’s user forum in Google.

Changed the methods asking for resource costs to ask for resource expected or actual work.

Continue reading

Merlin – Insert new resource roles quickly

In Merlin you can define the role of a resource and specify it thus a bit better. Merlin comes with a predefined list of resource roles. You will find them listed in the ‘info’ inspector by a selected resource and in the project settings (File > Project Settings > Value Lists > Resource). To define the role of your resource, select it first, switch to the “Info” inspector and select the desired role.

What happens if you don’t find the specific role in the list?
You may ‘Add’ a new resource role in the project settings while viewing the resources’ roles

OR…
just enter it in the Continue reading

Merlin – refresh resources’ address

In Merlin you can utilize contacts from Address Book, MS Entourage or LDAP server as resources for your projects. We have described in the past how this helps when working on multiple projects and require a pool with “master resources“.

The idea is simple. As a mac PM you probably already use Address Book or MS Entourage to manage your contacts, so why entering this data again and again for each and every one new project? You simply insert a contact from the library in your Merlin project and Merlin links to the contact of the source application. If you click on the icon or  displayed next to the name of the resource, the relevant application will be started and the person in Address Book will be displayed. As the resources are linked to the relevant data record, all modifications you make in the source application can reflect back in Merlin.

To refresh the contact information of inserted resources, Continue reading

Merlin – Assigning tasks quickly

One of the reasons why I love Merlin is because it is not stressing you into work the way it wants. It allows you to go your way. Take assigning tasks onto resources for example.
You have various possibilities to do so: