Activity scheduling software

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My company produces around 30 TV programmes in a year. Each programme involves around 10 specific activities, e.g. internal sales period, external sales period, scripting, filming, editing, etc., that last a number of weeks each and are spread across the year. There are resource issues incuding the need not to schedule the same salesman or camera crew for simultaneous activities.

We currently schedule these activities using a humoungous spreadsheet that is impossible to display adequately and has become unwieldy.

All the schedling software I’ve come across works like rota software, which is not what I’m looking for. Has anyone used anything which might do what I’m looking for.

David

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You can check out Microsoft Office Online: Project 2003 Home Page. Or some of the results from project scheduling software – Google Search. If you treat each show as a project then MS Project might be just what you want.

Joe

--Joe

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David

I agree with Joe. I toyed with Project for a few years until i wangled an advanced course out of my boss. I was actually amazed by the power of the software when you really drill down.

Benifits include resource planning and scheduling, identifying deliverables, project calendars and allowing multiple projects being viewed from a master ensuring resources are assigned and not conflicting…If you purchase it I really suggest you get some training to unleash its full potential.

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Thanks Jerry and Joe.

I have some experience with Project although not sufficiently to have come across master projects. The difficulty I have with Project is that it is too complicated 1) because my directors will be the ones playing with it, and 2) we don’t need most of what Project has to offer, such as dependencies, milestones and automated task movement. My boss achieves all he wants by adding text and colouring to cells in Excel; his problem is that the resulting sheet, being some 80 columns wide and 400 columns deep, does not lend itself to easy visualisation, and therefore is prone to hidden error.

I’m now wondering whether a small Access database to hold the activities together with a visual display of some sort of grid might give him sufficient functionality to adjust dates and see the result on screen/paper.

Thanks for the help

David

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David

Somewhere in the Lounge Excel archives ( I think) is a great little gizmo somebody wrote to produce simple Gantt charts using date and times and it created a graph looking like a gantt chart. If I can’t find it here I think I have it on one of my computers. This may sound a bit more like what a Director/Senior manager would use …are you interested?

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Sorry Dave

I have found the post now post 512,423

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I found this in the lounge a few years ago and it has been very useful for me. Technically not a chart but it simulates a gantt chart using conditional formatting. It is at Mr. Excel.

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