Creating makeshift timesheets in Project (need an idea)

[Mike]

The company in which I'm currently employed is moving to using Project
Server (2k7) as well as an implementation of PWA. In the meantime, I
need to generate some "makeshift" timesheets for my resources on my
various projects, so they can at least write down how many hours per
day they are putting towards specific tasks.

What we've been doing is basically came up with a custom "task usage"
view with a table that has slots for Monday-Friday in the middle, so
the end result is something like this:

| Monday | Tuesday |
Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
Summary Task 1 |
Summary Task 2 |
Task 1 |
John Q Public | |
| | | |

I print this out, hand it to John Q, and at the end of the week John
goes through his various tasks and just jots down a number for that
particular task, eventually tallying up to approximately 40 (when all
of his tasks are combined)

Although this is temporary, it is still very inconvenient for the
resources for obvious reasons. One thing I'd like to do to make these
Task Usage sheets easier to read is compress the summary task and task
hierarchy down to 1 line. So instead of a different line for each
summary task, the above might look like this:


m | t | w | th | f
Summary Task 1, Summary task 2, Task 1 - John Q. Public


Even if this is formatted weird when people view this, hopefully that
gets the point across. Essentially a way to show an entire hierarchy/
summary on a single line for at ask, rather than 6 lines to get 4
summary tasks and 1 real task, and 1 resource name.

Any ideas? If anyone needs clarifications, by all means let me know.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Mike

 

[John]

The company in which I'm currently employed is moving to using Project
Server (2k7) as well as an implementation of PWA. In the meantime, I
need to generate some "makeshift" timesheets for my resources on my
various projects, so they can at least write down how many hours per
day they are putting towards specific tasks.

What we've been doing is basically came up with a custom "task usage"
view with a table that has slots for Monday-Friday in the middle, so
the end result is something like this:

| Monday | Tuesday |
Wednesday | Thursday | Friday |
Summary Task 1 |
Summary Task 2 |
Task 1 |
John Q Public | |
| | | |

I print this out, hand it to John Q, and at the end of the week John
goes through his various tasks and just jots down a number for that
particular task, eventually tallying up to approximately 40 (when all
of his tasks are combined)

Although this is temporary, it is still very inconvenient for the
resources for obvious reasons. One thing I'd like to do to make these
Task Usage sheets easier to read is compress the summary task and task
hierarchy down to 1 line. So instead of a different line for each
summary task, the above might look like this:


m | t | w | th | f
Summary Task 1, Summary task 2, Task 1 - John Q. Public


Even if this is formatted weird when people view this, hopefully that
gets the point across. Essentially a way to show an entire hierarchy/
summary on a single line for at ask, rather than 6 lines to get 4
summary tasks and 1 real task, and 1 resource name.

Any ideas? If anyone needs clarifications, by all means let me know.

Thanks in advance for any help,

Mike

Mike,
Unfortunately there is no way to show the format you want in Project
itself. The timescaled data will need to be exported to Excel. There are
various ways to do that. By far the most flexible is with a custom
macro. Obviously, this requires knowledge of VBA and/or some help from
us in setting it up. The next best approach is to use the Visual Reports
feature of Project 2007. This of course is only viable if you already
have Project 2007 (you can use this even though the server environment
is not yet implemented). The third might be to use a combination of an
Export map for the basic task data, and the "analyze timescale data in
Excel" utility for the timescale data.

The bottom line - you can get what you want - it's just a matter of what
resources you have available and how much effort you want to put into
generating temporary makeshift timesheets.

Hope this helps.

John
Project MVP

 

[Mike]

Mike,
Unfortunately there is no way to show the format you want in Project
itself. The timescaled data will need to be exported to Excel. There are
various ways to do that. By far the most flexible is with a custom
macro. Obviously, this requires knowledge of VBA and/or some help from
us in setting it up. The next best approach is to use the Visual Reports
feature of Project 2007. This of course is only viable if you already
have Project 2007 (you can use this even though the server environment
is not yet implemented). The third might be to use a combination of an
Export map for the basic task data, and the "analyze timescale data in
Excel" utility for the timescale data.

The bottom line - you can get what you want - it's just a matter of what
resources you have available and how much effort you want to put into
generating temporary makeshift timesheets.

Hope this helps.

John
Project MVP- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

John,

Thank you. I suspected an answer such as this but didn't know for
sure. Thank you for the response.

Kind regards,
Mike

 

[John]

John,

Thank you. I suspected an answer such as this but didn't know for
sure. Thank you for the response.

Kind regards,
Mike

Mike,
You're welcome and thanks for the feedback.
John

 

[Tammy]

Mike,

We used the resource usage view to create a time entry sheet that shows each
task and the days of the week at the top the way you want. You can probably
"manipulate" this view to add M-F columns and a total hours worked for the
week column as well.

Tammy