Hi, I'm currently in the progress of preparing gantt charts for a project, timelines etc and microsoft project is an OK tool. Can anyone reccomend some visually appealing or more user friendly project management software? I'm working on a 200 room mine site expansion and although its not big I would like to produce a semi impressive and flexable timeline for my client to follow. Our company has only 5 engineers and I'm a mechanical  engineer, the rest are civils/mechanical and so we dont really do much work on the management side however it is becoming more and more obvious that it is a critical part in the process from design to construction and we need a better management system than the one we have. Any help at all would be great. Thanks in advance.

Well you seem to have five requirements.

visually appealing
user friendly
semi impressive
flexable timeline
a better management system

I'd also suggest a spellchecker.

I'm no great fan of Project but it looks pretty, any old hack can use it, nobody has ever been impressed by a Gantt chart and your last two need better definition.

Personally if I want to run a schedule exactly to my taste then I use a spreadsheet, not some mickey mouse bit of visual basic.

 

Cheers

Greg Locock


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I manage a lot of Oil & Gas onshore construction projects and have tried several of the very expensive high-end project management tools.  None of them make sense for projects less than 2 years duration.  For anything quicker than a couple of years I use MicroSoft Project.

David

I agree, MS Project if you want to pay for software or the very very similar Open Workbench.  It's similar, because all project management software consists of tasks, start dates, end dates, duration, and resource management that can be either displayed as a gantt chart or pareto chart.

If you want more of a spreadsheet control, you can try Smartsheet.  But I think even Excel 2010 offers ways to create Gantt charts.
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/custom-gantt-charts-for-excel-EM010178777.aspx?redir=0

--Scott
http://www.wertel.pro

Want to get really sexy and a really sexy price - look at Primavera!!

That price is only sexy to the developer.  Most people will feel too sick at their stomachs over the price to think about sex.

David

cheers guys helps a lot. Cut me a little slack Greg, wrote it after flying in from Cape Town to Perth at 3am and wanted to wake up to some answers lol thanks for the . Numbers are in the 11 figures and 3-5 years time line. Most of what I've done has been around the 9 figure mark and project has been good so I guess I will be sticking with it. Thanks all. PS Primavera looks good. I might hire a flash designer to integrate the project timeline with an animation with pending and in progress flashing etc available online for the client so they know its moving along.  

You could try ProjectEngineer, which is an online tool I use. www.projectengineer.net.