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Merlin: Reporting ways

on 5. May 2010

Copy as Rich TextOne of the main responsibilities of a PM is to report regularly project relevant information. This could be the project’s current state, cost forecasts, current balance between budget and actual costs to name just a few. When you use Merlin for project management on Mac OS X, there are various ways to create these reports out of your Merlin projects:

  • You may export your project as a CSV file to drop in a spreadsheet and calculate further using the planned, expected, and actual values.
  • Export into iCal files (ics) and have your project events transferred into calendar applications.
  • You can also go the obvious way: File > New report… and select one of the report templates Merlin offers*

Just another possibility you might not know by now, is…

  • To select your Merlin columns,  copy them as rich text and paste into a text editor (like Pages.app, TextEdit.app, or even Mail.app)

Select in Merlin and call Edit > Copy as Rich text
You will see your columns with their contents pasted and layouted in a table:

Paste in Pages

_

*) Watch a movie at YouTube showing report creation

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Written by Vicky Stamatopoulou
Vicky Stamatopoulou works at ProjectWizards. She contributes to the MacPM.net blog, Merlin user forums, or other web spaces of ProjectWizards. The content provided is about Merlin or Mac usage, documentation, AppleScripting, or customization. Google+
Integrating Merlin to...,Merlin,Merlin How To…,Project Management | Comments (5)

5 Comments »

  1. Comment by christian (May 5, 2010 @ 10:15 pm

    Is it possible to change to logo. I would like to change the Merlin log with my companies logo.

    Is it possible have a report with all resources expected cost on it?

    thank you.

  2. Comment by Vicky Stamatopoulou (May 5, 2010 @ 10:28 pm

    Hi Christian,

    to change the logo in the reports, just drop the logo of your company into the project’s icon (File > Project Settings > Misc pane)

    To report the expected costs of your resources, just switch to the utilization view, enable the display of the ‘expected cost’ column, select your rows, and Copy as Rich text as described in this post.

    Best regards, Vicky

  3. Comment by patrik (May 15, 2010 @ 12:28 am

    One annoying behavior of the HTML export (and other export options) is the way it handles navigating folders.

    There isn’t a way to overwrite an existing report. I export an HTML report to a shared network drive every week. However, I have to manually delete the folder it goes into everytime.

    This is because Merlin automatically creates a new folder named whatever is in the ‘Export to’ field of the dialog box. And if you try to type in the existing folder name, instead of overwriting that folder with a newer report, it will drill into that folder and create a new folder within that one with the same name as the enclosing folder (assuming you keep the same name)!

    So, everytime I export, I have to go into the folder, delete last week’s folder and re-export. If I mis-type the name of lst week’s folder (and so on), everyone who has a bookmark to the report won’t be able to access it until I correct the folder name.

  4. Comment by Vicky Stamatopoulou (May 17, 2010 @ 2:25 pm

    I understand your point, and forward it as a feature request to the management.

    Things are easier if you don’t rename Merlin’s suggestion for the name of the exported folder.

    So, lets say you’ve exported once into HTML and now you choose to export again, keep the folder name suggestion and simply select the folder which should contain it. Merlin will notice that a folder by this name already exists and it will prompt a dialogue asking you whether to “Replace” the folder or not.

    Best regards, Vicky

  5. Pingback by Merlin – Modifying existing reports » MacPM (July 22, 2011 @ 3:09 pm

    [...] The post(s) explaining how to edit existing templates to create some of your own will be more or less technical.  If you don’t like technical staff, and need to report information from your Merlin project which is not offered over the existing report templates, we recommend to configure the columns in the Merlin views, maybe do a search or limit visible date range and print in a PDF. You may also export your data and import in another software to do there further visualizations. More on this approach here [...]

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