Hello At any one time I find I am juggling approximately 30
commissions and a long waiting list and have decided to look into a
computer package to help manage my time. What I am after is a way in
which I can enter and juggle around my start and finish times of
projects so that I can visualise when I have a particularly busy
period and which will also help me keep up with everything that I have
to do each week/day. I have used MS Project in a previous job which
would fit the bill but it is really expensive (about �380 over here!)
and I think I would be paying for features that I would never use (I
wouldn’t need to network it or anything for a start) and that I could
try something simpler and hopefully less expensive. I have seen
something called “TURBO PROJECT” on Amazon which sounds good
from the description in Amazon but there is no try-before you buy
option here. Does anybody know whether this is any good for managing
our sort of projects? Or can anybody recommend a good software
product that can handle so many overlapping and every-moving
projects? I am currently running Windows 95. I tried Lotus
Organiser but this was no good as it only allows a maximum of about 9
projects at any one time. Thank you for your help in advance, Best
wishes Harriet, Hitchin, UK
Turboproject do offer a free version.
You can get this at their site
http://www.imsisoft.com/products/turboproject/
click on free downloads!
Tony Konrath
Hi Harriet,
Why not just use a bar chart format. List the weeks in cells going
across the top of a page, and the projects in a column down the left
hand side of the page. For each project, draw a dark bar from the
starting week, to the proposed finish week. As you look down the
chart you can see weeks which are assigned alot of “bars” those are
your crunch periods. I’ll put in a diagram below, but the formatting
may not hold.
Nikki
Jan 1 Jan 8 Jan 15 Jan 22 Jan 29 Feb 5 Feb 12
Feb 19
ring 1 ++++++++++++++
ring 2 +++++++++++++++++++
pendant ++++++++++++++
Champleve ++++++++++