Product Reviews

Project management on the Mac seems to have entered a golden age. Recently-released Merlin 2.5 (see MacUser, 1 February 2008) is streets ahead of the PConly, market-dominant Microsoft Project. And another Mac upstart, Omni Group's OmniPlan 1.5, will offer stiff competition to Merlin for simpler projects.

Like Merlin, OmniPlan can display projects in several different ways. A traditional Task view splits the window between a text-based task outline and a Gantt chart, which shows a visual representation of the duration of tasks in a project and their relationship with each other. Version 1.5 has fine control over a project's timescale, which can stretch from minutes to years, and OmniPlan can even set a suitable scale for you.

A Resource view shows basic information about staff, equipment and materials - although these can't be shared with other projects - while the Calendar view lets you adjust a project's working hours.

Once you've entered tasks, you can establish dependencies between them by selecting them in the project window and clicking on the Connection button. Resources can be assigned to tasks and once allocated, these can be levelled across the project to establish the most efficient way of running it. The critical path - those tasks that affect the end date of the project - can be quickly highlighted via a dedicated

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toolbar button.

While you can easily adjust task times and relationships in the main window by dragging them, much of the spade work is done through a powerful Inspector palette. This enables you to view task and project dependencies and resources, as well as view and edit task duration. You can also use the Inspector as a medium to attach external files to individual tasks as well as projects. This alone makes the program much more viable as a project organiser.

Once timings are established they can be saved as a baseline and compared to the actual schedule in the Task view; a more detailed variance can be examined in the Inspector.

OmniPlan makes a good, though not perfect, job of importing Microsoft Project files. It doesn't recognise split tasks created in Project, or zero-length tasks; instead OmniPlan views the latter as project milestones, which seems more sensible to us. File transfer is also excellent the other way: you can export OmniPlan tasks to a variety of formats including .csv format and iCal files. But version 1.5 still doesn't support true iCal syncing. This is one area where Merlin (which offers bi-directional syncing) pulls ahead of it.

As well as the standard project views OmniPlan offers Task view presets - from the default simple schedule to a complex project view that crams more information on to the screen. In addition, you can now filter tasks to show only those that match certain criteria. Its a live filter view - if you're filtering to show only tasks due in the next few hours, the Task view will automatically update over time. This ability to customise makes it easier to manage more complicated projects.

OmniPlan may lack Merlin's ability to share resources or support multiple users but it's easy to use. Its interface is clear, common functions are easily accessible and its help file is superb. In short: a good bet if you need to organise a single project quickly.