Merlin Report Template documentation - is there any?

[Gavin Lawrie]

I am hoping to be able to create a custom report - i.e. create a new template, but cannot find any information about how to do this.  Is there any documentation relating to this?  I have found none so far, and nothing obvious in this forum either.  But maybe I'm just missing something hidden in plain view... 

Thanks in advance for any help with this

[e.s.]

Creating new reports requires programming abilities. 

It could be easier to use advanced search, customized column sets and report over File > Print > PDF

More info on advanced search or custom reports here:

http://www.projectwizards.net/en/macpm/merlin/merlin-advanced-search-as-reporting

best regards, Vicky

Sent from my iPhone

On 09.02.2012, at 08:12, Gavin Lawrie <gavin....@gmail.com> wrote:

I am hoping to be able to create a custom report - i.e. create a new template, but cannot find any information about how to do this.  Is there any documentation relating to this?  I have found none so far, and nothing obvious in this forum either.  But maybe I'm just missing something hidden in plain view... 

Thanks in advance for any help with this

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[Gavin Lawrie]

Thanks Vicky, will have a look.

I have dug around the links associated with the one you posted, and suspect that what I am looking for is documented in a blog entry series starting here.  I'll work through these also, and hopefully between the two get something working.  But I'm astonished that to change the colours of the header bars in the standard reports (to give a trivial example) I have to rummage around inside OS X application package files, edit things with a code editor, and have working knowledge of CSS, XML, etc.

Overall I and my team are pretty disappointed that Merlin doesn't play more nicely for reporting information out.  We're not expert project managers, nor is the project we are using Merlin for weird or complicated.  If we're bumping into Merlin's limitations routinely, I can't imagine what sort of problems someone running a real project will encounter trying to use this app.

[Vicky Stamatopoulou]

Am Feb 11, 2012 um 12:13 AM schrieb Gavin Lawrie:

Thanks Vicky, will have a look.

I have dug around the links associated with the one you posted, and suspect that what I am looking for is documented in a blog entry series starting here.  I'll work through these also, and hopefully between the two get something working.  But I'm astonished that to change the colours of the header bars in the standard reports (to give a trivial example) I have to rummage around inside OS X application package files, edit things with a code editor, and have working knowledge of CSS, XML, etc.

Reports are made as HTML outputs. So their formatting happens over CSS. That's how it is right now. Sorry.

Merlin comes with a standard set of reports. The blog series gives a tip to those technical aware users wanting to create or modify them. Merlin is not suggesting that in order to report, you need to know how reports work. If you don't find a report kind in the standard set, you can use advanced search, limit the visible display, do report via Print.

If this is not enough, just copy the visible columns and paste in EXCEL to do the reports with charts there. 

Overall I and my team are pretty disappointed that Merlin doesn't play more nicely for reporting information out.  We're not expert project managers, nor is the project we are using Merlin for weird or complicated.  If we're bumping into Merlin's limitations routinely, I can't imagine what sort of problems someone running a real project will encounter trying to use this app.

Which limitations are those? In the reports you mean? We would appreciate your suggestions, as mentioned here:

http://www.projectwizards.net/en/macpm/merlin/more-reports-and-templates-in-merlin…

Best regards, Vicky

[Gavin Lawrie]

I'll certainly post some suggestions once we work out how to solve current issues with the reports we need.

Mostly the limitations have been found in the rest of Merlin.  We’re doing a 12 month project involving a team of about 18 people.  The project is modular (so there are at least five replications of the same workplan on different organisational units), and changes frequently and rapidly (as the timing of when start and stop these modules shifts due to external changes in dates), and the deliverables and methods evolve as the project develops.  

So things like the inability to easily manage / replicate a common block of activities (there is a ghastly hack that requires multiple search / replaces, but really not great).  Tracking how a change to the project affects the overall budget compared to a previous version (it seems you can’t set a ‘baseline’ project and compare changes against it) are a pain.  We’ve also had weird problems relating to how Merlin schedules resources, problems with imports / exports to MS Project, and even simple things like cut / paste crashing merlin.  Deep in the list is the inability of Merlin to do generic word-wrapping / row height adjustment in cells - you can do it but only by setting all rows of the required class to the height required for the largest cell, but this relies on you knowing what this is, and it not changing in use (so if it is the list of assigned resources, and you add to this list, any row height settings break).  If you have one row of cells with lots of information, you end up with ludicrously long reports… 

But I just run the company - others have been doing the bulk of the work, and these comments are based on the noise generated by their correspondence with Merlin support… (and hear the excuses that the reason why the plan is late is …. (fill in something else they can’t get Merlin to do)).  It may be that there are ways to do these things (if so, please let us know!) but I know they have been logging problems with Project Wizards product support pretty much since the day we got our first license.

However I am familiar with CSS / XML, and frustrated by Merlin's inability to produce a simple sensible routine report that sets

[Gavin Lawrie]

oops… deleted end of the previous post accidentally… here's what is missing

… out for a team-member what we are expecting them to do over the next fortnight, I’ve dusted off the keyboard and am having a go at trying to produce it.  Unfortunately since there are 18 people on the team, and the project will run for the rest of 2012, the idea of manually editing the HTML for each report each week is not practicable.  So we need to do something that can be run as a report (or a simple workflow that allows this without needing CSS / programming skills to operate).

Merlin seems to work (but others in the team who know more say it is not nearly as useful as MS Project) and has the big advantage of working natively on Macs.  But in our experience it doesn’t work that well: I get the feeling that it was designed to do something other than what we are trying to use it for.  But what that ‘other’ thing is remains a mystery.

Gavin