I am a Project Manager at KPMG and I create a lot of Gantt charts to convey project schedules. It’s important to me to have a solid tool for this process.

As you all know I abhor MS Project, because of its lack of intuitiveness as well as stovepiping a certain way of doing work.  I checked out Merlin 2 to see if there was Gantt Chart software for the Mac that might use instead. 

Here’s how Merlin is Awesome — especially in comparison to MS Project:

• You can zoom in to days and zoom out to weeks/months quite easily. Scaling seems like a really awesome feature that Project is just way behind in presentation-wise.
• Merlin provides a library of frequently used Gantt Chart templates to get you started.  When importing Gantt charts from one project into another projects in MS Project, it just hurts.  Bad, BAD things happen.
• Gantt Chart presentation in Merlin is just splendid.  Simply right off the charts.  Drop-shadows, anti-aliasing, soft edges — it’s just gorgeous.  With this Gantt chart tool for the Mac, my project documentation now has substance and style.
• Merlin’s representation of task completion is incredibly intuitive.  The shading of the entire bar just makes so much more sense than how it’s done in Project.
• Task names are printed on the bars in the Gantt chart.  You can print the Gantt chart without the WBS, and convey nearly the entire project plan in so much less space.
• Merlin has a well thought-out Print dialog with tons of helpful options which allow you to quickly print exactly what you want of the Gantt chart.
• Merlin’s help system is remarkable - it provides a thoughtful and well presented introductory course in Project Management concepts mapped to the part of the software to which that lesson applies.
• Merlin is completely compatible with Microsoft Project - but MS Project is not Project Management software for the Mac - so, no Gantt charts on the Mac from MS Proect.
• Merlin is scads cheaper.  In fact, if you want to get the beta of Merlin 2.5, it’s FREE!  Yes, you heard me right, free.  Have at it.

If you’re looking for a Gantt Charting tool for the Mac or for Project Management Software for the Mac — Merlin is a serious contender.  Give ‘er a peek.

ASE looks like they have a pretty nice component for embedding in .Net applications.   It appears that it will work in ASP.Net as well, which is pretty hot.

Check out their chart gallery of how it works when using it for Gantt Charts.

The Gannt Chart versions don’t look as hot as some of the others in their gallery, but I’m sure that’s configurable.

I can’t quite tell how the licensing works.  It seems like you have to have parts resident on a separate server.  Regardless, the $149 for the component will far outweigh the costs of having to write the darn thing yourself from scratch, the years of testing and debugging necessary to get it working just right, etc.

I say componentized software development is certainly the way to go.

If you need to make the bars taller than 24 pixels high in Microsoft project, you don’t really have much of a choice, it would seem.

You are presented with a drop-down list, and the tallest selection available is 24.  So, how do you make one bigger so that you can make it stand out from the rest or fill the page for a presentation?

Well, depending upon what you’re trying to do there are a few workarounds:

You could make another bar on the next row, and butt the two of them together through the Format -> Bar Styles dialog.

Then again, if you’re just trying to make the whole thing look bigger when you print it out, the Page Setup functionality will let you scale the whole thing up to fill the page.

OmniGroup just let the world know that OmniPlan 1.5 RC 1 is now available for download.

I’ve learned to despise all of the idiosyncracies of Micro$oft Project, and am always on the lookout for a management software.  I need something that lets me easily add tasks, resources, baseline, compare schedules vs. actuals and as so frequently happens — allow people to book more time in a single work day than an 8 hour shift without rearranging my entire project plan for me.  Jeez, that annoys the living crap out of me. </rant>

Okay, so I’m definitely going to pick up the demo version.  I use a Wintel machine, but I also work with graphic artists who almost always work on their Mac.  So, another great thing about OmniPlan is that there’s a Mac version available.  I’ll keep you posted on how exciting the OmniPlan 1.51 release is, but let me tell ya… from the screenshots online, this is one super-sexy piece of project management software.