This is a reprint of Freds 'Post Pumpkin' stuff. Format has been slightly altered to assist mailers.
Firstly let me thank you all for the "Golden Pumkin Award", I must however, pass the credit on to my colleague, Dennise Knowles, to whom I have delegated the labourious task of doing all the evaluations.
Herein is the latest batch of evals. Hope its of use. If anyone else is doing evaluations on other products I would be most intested.
These cover several project tools including MS Project, Open Plan, Primavera and Milestones.
I suppose I should say something like;
This text is offered as is and are not meant to be definitive. Foster Wheeler accepts no responsibility for any errors and omissions. The interpritation and use of these evaluations are entirely at the users risk.
The only other thing worth mentioning is why the hell didn't Microsoft build a spell checker into their latest mail package?.........
Microsoft Project 4.0 for Windows
There are a number of software packages in use around the company which are used to help plan projects. It is very important that these packages support 'year 2000' dates and are capable of dealing with projects which either have future dates in the 21st century or are due to begin in the 21st century. To find out more about your particular planning tools capabilities with reference to dates in the 21st century, please click on the appropriate icon below.
Microsoft Project can deal with year 2000 dates and
will allow four digit years to be entered, it also has
a date span from 'January 1st 1984' to 'December 31st
2049'. Thus even if the date is entered with a
two-digit year field e.g. '03/03/01', the year will
still be assumed to be a 21st century year, as the year
1900 is not within Microsoft Projects valid date range.
It is advisable to enter dates with a four digit year
to avoid confusion, however for the purpose of examples
within this documentation, the format 'dd/mm/yy' has
been used. The format of timescales within Microsoft
Project can also be changed to allow for dates to be
displayed. In order to change the format of these
timescales, first click with right hand mouse button on
the timescale, then choose timescales from the pop-up
menu. A screen will then be displayed, showing all the
different options for the major and minor scales of the
timescale. There are a number of options given. These
options are: units, count, label, align and tick lines,
all of which can be used to alter the appearance of the
timescale. All of these options are available for both
the major and minor timescales and can handle any year
2000 issues correctly. A summary of the options is
given below.
Units
This option is used to change the units displayed on
the timescale. The type of units available are Years,
Months, Weeks etc.
Count
This option is used to change the frequency of the
units on the timescale; for example a count of one
would display 'Jan Feb Mar Apr' etc. whereas a count of
two would display 'Jan Mar May Jul' etc.
Label
This option is used to change the format of the date on
the screen. Some of its options include 'January',
'Jan', '01' etc.
Align
This option is used to change the justification of the
dates. It has three options, these are 'right', 'left'
and 'centre'.
Tick Lines
This option allows you to choose whether or not to have
tick lines(separating lines) in the timescale.
Microsoft project also recognises leap years and will
not allow a start or end date to be entered as an
invalid date, e.g. '29/02/97' is not valid. The
timescale which runs along the top of the Gantt chart
will also not display February 29th, unless it is a
leap year. Microsoft Project also has a facility
called duration, which will calculate the time a task
will take to complete. This package also deals well
with leap years as can be seen from the following:
Sorts can also be performed within Microsoft Project on
the date range and these will sort correctly even if
the dates span over the century change over.
A filter can also be used in order to abstract the
information required, this can be done by choosing the
'Filtered for:' option from the 'Tools' menu and then
choosing the type of filter you wish to use. Microsoft
Project can filter the data very effectively on dates
even if the data to be filtered has a mix of the two
centuries.
Microsoft Project also contains a number of built in
macros, there are two macros in particular which use
dates, they are 'AdjustDates' and 'DateRangeFromToday'.
These two macros are described in more detail below.
'AdjustDates'
This macro will prompt the user for a new start date
and will then adjust all other dates within the
'project' to fit in with this new date. For example if
a project is set up with an original start date of
'01/01/2000' and the first task is due to finish on
'29/02/2000' then if the original start date is
adjusted to '01/01/2001' then the first task will now
be due to finish on '01/03/2001'.
'DateRangeFromToday'
This macro will prompt the user for a number of days
either before or after today's date; e.g. if today's
date is '01/01/2000' and the user enters a 'number of
days after' of 10 then only those tasks with a start
date of between 'today's date' and 10 days
later(inclusive) will be displayed on the screen.
Each of these macros can also handle dates after the
year 2000 and are not affected if the dates concerned
span across the two different centuries.
This package is DOS based and is used to plan and
manage projects. It does this via the use of a base
database which can either be dBASE or Foxpro, but as
dBase is more widely used within the company than
Foxpro, it is dBASE which OpenPlan has been tested
against. This does not necessarily mean that OpenPlan
will not work with Foxpro, it simply means that it has
not been tested with Foxpro yet.
When the data comes from a dBASE database, the format
of the date fields very much depends on the way in
which the date fields have been set up within dBASE.
More information concerning the setup of dates within
dBASE can be found in the database section of this Year
2000' documentation.
Open Plan will allow centuries to be displayed, but in
order to do this, the century option must first be
switched on. This can be done by choosing
"configurations" from the systems menu then "general
installations" from the configurations menu. Towards
the bottom of the general installations screen are two
options, one which allows you to change how the dates
are displayed and another which gives you the option of
turning the century option on or off. In order to
display dates with a four digit year, this century
facility must be switched on, this can be done by
pressing enter when the 'Y/N' of the set century option
is highlighted.Microsoft Project 4.0 for Windows
Start Date Finish Date Duration
*These durations are calculated using working days
only; in this case Monday to Friday were chosen as the
working days.
'20/02/00' '01/03/00' 9 days*
'20/02/01' '01/03/01' 8 days*
OPEN PLAN Version 5.0