Adding more than one Task to a row. 1

Does anyone know if there is a way of having a number of seperate task on one line (row) without doing task 1 / task2

I have been asked by my bosses to set up a planning system using excel. I have discovered that excel isn't up to the job and said why not try project. Due to the number of task undertaken in my organisation the ms project screen would have too many rows on the screen making it rather difficult to use.

Does anyone know other planning programmes that are worth looking at.

Thanks for any help in advance

 

[rptaylor]

Hi Dave,

No, you can't have more than one task per row.
If its just a particular view you want, you can of course compress task groups as you wish, or by levels if appropriate.

MS Excel is an extremely good spreadsheet, but I really would not recommend using as a project planning tool.
MS Project 2000 is a fairly good tool:
- it has a large number of users and shares the look & feel of the other MS Office tools (to a large extent)
but:
- it suffers from a number of problems, particularly for novice users who may not spot that Project has done something that produces incorrect answers (yes, it really can do this!)
- it doesn't enforce good project management practice
- it doesn't include any risk management capability, although an add-on like @Risk from Palisade can be made to work successfully
- It doesn't really look like a tool developed by experienced Project Managers (probably a bit unfair to MS, but its a view shared by many of my PM colleagues)

An alternative that my company is currently considering is a tool called "Pertmaster". We haven't completely convinced ourselves of its merits just yet, but it does look very good so far. It seems to answer all of the points against MSP2000, and the technical support we have received to date has been very good.

The thing to bear in mind is that project management is still fairly immature as a profession IMHO, and the tools available reflect this. I have yet to see a PM tool that really covers all the bases and has good PM practice at its heart.

Hope this helps!
Cheers ---
Russell Taylor BEng CEng MIEE
Hampshire, UK.

 

[blooda]

Yo,

Try looking at Asta Power Project we used it in the mid 90's as a successful tool for thumbnail planning as it is very graphical.

Pertmaster is still quite good and very user friendly, we were using a DOS version in the late 80's early 90's and I was on the Beta test team for PM 4.2 for windows (1995/6)


Rgrds

AB