MSFT Project Gripes

September 8, 2007 @ Herding Cats from Glen Alleman

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I've just spent 6 weeks building an Integrated Master Plan and Integrated Master Schedule (IMP/IMS) for a proposal effort. Using MSFT Project 2003 10 to 12 hours a day has revealed some things that drive me crazy (same things are in 2007, expect one):

  1. The print dialog is not windows standard. You can't change the printer from the preview screen. Once changed in the Print dialog, it is not sticky.
  2. The View management is generally Lame. Once a View in the global is modified in anyway, it sticks with the local file. This is fine for casual users, but we have 29 master files and a few dozen views. Keeping the Views in sync requires care. What would nice is a View (and Table, Filter etc) manager that lets you define for a specific file what View or other item is to be used - local or global.
  3. There is no split screen mode, other than to open another instance of the same file. Again this is not an issue for the casual user. But our files are 1,000's of lines long. Moving up and down the file looking for items that need to be connected is a pain.
  4. There is no conditional formating based on any field in the schedule. We built a macro that does this, but it would be very nice if the Bar Styles could do conditional formatting.
  5. Of course the famous one-level UNDO has been fixed in 2007.
  6. There is no single step to go to the end of the project. It takes two steps. CTRL END, then CTRL Left Arrow.
  7. In 2007, even though the Options are set to save as a 2003 file, 2007 always asks what to do. I already told it what to do. When I opened a 2003 file, save it as a 2003 file.
  8. The select row process of running down the rows ALWAYS runs past the end of the project. This is annoying but it also creates new rows at times. The same is true of any fill down.
  9. Finally the killer defect is that the file extension for 2003 and 2007 IS THE SAME. All other MSFT products add an "X" to the end .doc versus .docx, .ppt versus .pptx. This is the absolutely most lame thing there is. When working in a mixed environment this is a disaster. I uninstalled my 2007 version and went back to 2003 for this project.

My sense is the people that build this application don't actually use it in any meaningful way. Our typical projects is 500 to 5,000 lines long.


This article is syndicated from Herding Cats . The original article is available here. Read more in Project Management News .

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