Tag Archives: Styles

Applescript – elapsed duration in human friendly time units

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When planing and managing your projects with Merlin for Mac OS X you have 4 main windows: Activities, Resources, Netplan, Utilization.

Depending on the view you have selected, the main area offers you different details and information about your project. You can view and in certain cases modify the main outline of your project, adding activities, groups and milestones. Furthermore, this area also allows you to work interactively with the Gantt chart, Netplan and resource utilization.

Per default the label in the Gantt bar show the expected duration in working times. So it may show 2 days for example for a task starting Friday and ending Monday if weekend is defined to be workfree time.

If you want the label in the Gantt to show the real time elapsed, you may do so. Just go to View > Show View Options > Styles
Click into the label you want to edit and select “expected elapsed duration” for its content.

This of course would then show the duration in e-units. What to do if you don’t want those edays, emonths, eweeks to be shown? You may use attached script sample created in AppleScript.

It goes throught all activities of the top most opened project, checks for the expected elapsed duration of the task, and writes it in the subtitle field in human friendly units. If you enable the display of “subtitle” for the label, you are set.

Note: The script cannot create a live connection between the columns “subtitle” and “expected elapsed duration”. That is, before printing your project, make sure you call the script again Gantt  to actualize outputted data. Continue reading →

Merlin: Coloring priorities

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We have already wrote about the various PM templates Merlin has built-in. One of them is called ‘ToDo List’. It was implemented, as the name states, to help you creating easily a list for your ToDos.

If you use this template you will notice that the activities are colored. Can you guess why is this so? No?

colored ToDosLet me give you a tip… Enable the column ‘Priority’ in the Outline, you will see that the activities have priority levels and as you know Merlin applies styles by conditions.

So… now you know. In this project a style set was used for coloring.

To enable the priority coloring onto your project, make sure your activities have the appropriate priority level set, call View > Show View Options, switch to the ‘Styles’ tab if necessary, and select from the ‘Style Sets’ popup the ‘Priority’ set:

Priority

To define other colors than the predefined ones,  simply select the conditions (very high priority, low priority, etc ) and edit accordingly.

You may want to check attached screencast

Merlin: Wrap text to next line

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Have you came across this situation? You enter long titles for your activities or activity groups and notice that the column width is not wide enough to display the complete text. So you enlarge the column to get the whole text visible and ‘steal’ space from your Gantt. Not a very good solution, your monitor has a defined resolution after all, and you cannot expand Merlin’s window for ever…

Well this is a problem you do not really need to cope with. How?

Continue reading →