Moved from MicrosoftProjectViewer
"Painless Software Schedules"
article by Joel Spolsky 2000-03-29
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html
recommends
"... to make schedules ...
1) Use Microsoft Excel. Don't use anything fancy like Microsoft Project.
...
One of the reasons that Excel is such a great product for working on software schedules is that the only thing most Excel programmers use Excel for is maintaining their software schedules!"
[That's not so much because Excel is actually so great at doing scheduling, it's just that it is so very much less brain-damaged than Microsoft Project.]
- Is this a suggestion to use Excel macros for dependency tracking (emulating some of Project's functionality while hopefully avoiding its bugs), or a suggestion to avoid automatic dependency tracking?
- Joel says that dependencies are too obvious to track, which I think is a very odd thing to say. My personal experience is that (a) for simple projects, the level of effort needed to get anything useful done in Project vastly exceeds what one gets in return, and (b) for complex projects, Project is badly broken, period, although with enough sleepless nights and weekends people have been known to beat it into submission.
- You can get the best of both world's by using Steelray's Excel template to track your project and Steelray to give you the main views that Project does (Gantt, Calendar, Resource, etc). http://www.steelray.com/excel.html
- I've used Project successfully on large projects; though with templates prepared by consultants that the company hired. These consultants provided lots of training (in particular on just what to avoid doing in Project).
- That's the kind of thing I mean. Do you happen to have a list of what they said to avoid?
- See TipsForMicrosoftProject
- I see one of those tips is "Avoid any dependencies other than finish-to-start". For me, that suffices to summarize the whole topic.
- Therefore, may as well just use Excel, where you can easily get simple results, and if you need something complex, you know ahead of time how much work you'll have to put into making Excel do things that it wasn't directly intended to do, and Excel won't actively fight you, at least.
- This is not just my opinion; I think most people agree, even the ones who have long since gotten used to its foibles, at least if you challenge them whether they ever had to work nights and weekends to get Project to do things.
- I've also known multiple people who were tempted to do a competing software product, that would just plain do what you told it, but the thought of competing with Microsoft dissuaded each of them.
- But lots of companies exist which customize Project and make it more usable. Agreed that it has much to be desired.
- [I've used Project successfully on many large and small projects. It never seemed broken to me. In fact, it worked better than any of the other project scheduling tools I've used. If someone can recommend a better tool, please do.]
- There used to be a program called TimeLine (circa 1990) that worked better then than MS Project does now.
Suggested Alternatives:
Excel As Project Scheduler