Forum Discussion
Schedule Report
Is a view/report similar to this possible in MS Project? our plant is used to seeing an Excel spreadsheet like this, which is very efficient. Basically, it's a Gantt chart where each cell is a task, and each row is a rolled-up summary, but you can still see the labels for each sub-task. MS Project spreads everything out so much, you can't really get very much detail on one sheet. Thanks!
- RobertOrnelas,
Yeah Project has a lot of subtle options that can make all the difference.
1. Double click on the summary line to bring up the task information window. Check the "Hide Bar" option. That will hide the summary line bar but allow rolled up subtask bars to appear, as long as the Rollup field is marked ad "yes" for the summary and all subtasks.
2. There is no "Subtask Name" field, the field is simply "Name", as shown in my screenshot.
Does that help?
John
- Robert Ornelas,
You say you developed macros to make it behave like a schedule. What exactly do the macros do with respect to the data on the spreadsheet you show?
You also mention a "cell" being a task. Help us out here, we can't read your mind, all we see is a spreadsheet with some data in columns and some type of timescaled data. We have no idea what the data in the columns represents nor do we have an inkling on what is represented by the timescaled data.
If you can expand upon what you need from Project, perhaps we can suggest a way to get there.
JohnThanks, everyone. I am using Project Professional Desktop. Our macros just shift rows left and right and update daily production by moving the dates to make it behave like a Gantt chart. It's really just like I described it. If you think in MS Project terms, it's just individual tasks rolled up into a summary task, but you can still see the individual task labels in one row. In MS Project, each subtask takes up an entire row, leaving a lot of empty space in the Gantt chart. I looked into Power BI, and that's a lot of money to spend for a report for an already powerful and expensive tool (Project). Before I spend that kind of money, I'll try creating macros in Project, or export my Data to Excel. I've almost been able to create this view in Primavera SureTrack Software a long time ago, but it was still very inefficient with space. I can't be the only person who would benefit from a production schedule like this that eliminates all of the unnecessary graphics and white space that are shown in a typical Gantt chart.
It seems like one of your main focus items is to show task Gantt bars at summary level and that is indeed possible with Project. Take this example:
When the summary is collapsed, this is what appears.
Does that help? If so, what else do you need from Project? Keep in mind you won't get all the flexibility of the open format offered by Excel but you will get the benefits of an app that's dedicated to scheduling. And as you note, exporting Project to Excel for custom reporting is readily done with VBA.
John
- Robert Ornelas,
I tend to agree with Dale. If Excel is the "cat's meow" for your organization why do you want to use Project?
However, if you do want to use Project, I'd say the Task Usage view, perhaps filtered or grouped, comes closest to the Excel spreadsheet format in your screen shot.
John - Robert -- If I were your organization, I would continue to use Microsoft Excel for this purpose. Just my two cents' worth. Hope this helps.
Dale_HowardMVP Thanks for the input. We've been using this spreadsheet for a while, and we have developed a series of macros to try to make it behave like scheduling software. Each of these products needs to be drawn, produced, and installed, and now 3 separate departments are faced with maintaining 3 separate schedules. I was kind of hoping that Project would be an upgrade since that's what it was designed to do.
- Why wouldn't you suggest PowerBI?
Hey ProjectFuture ,
As a guess, Dale_HowardMVP probably didn't suggest Power BI for one of the following reasons:
- Power BI is read-only - this Excel sheet is probably interactive / editable data
- To use Power BI, the organisation would need to use Project Web App. The post only mentioned MS Project which is just the desktop project tool.
Or maybe there was another reason..
Hope that helps
Paul
