Unexpected use cases for Merlin Project?

Frank Blome

I just had an interesting discussion with a very loyal customer. He mentioned that Merlin Project is not only good for project management but also for many other things.

Now I am interested in your experience or knowledge: What do you use Merlin Project for besides PM?

sebgraf

Hi,

I am a passionate user of Merlin Project for many years and have it used all the time as a project management tool. In my currently project I am facing the challenge to create a nice looking Orgchart for an organization with close to 1000 departments. All the tools I tested so far miserably failed in flexibility and quality of the diagram. To my surprise I discovered that Merlin is even for this use case better than many other tools. The only whish I would have (I know this is far from Merlin core functionality) would be to be able to export an orgchart in HTML and then having the option to drill (hide unhide) parts of the org tree like it is possible with a gantt chart. Currently it only exports a svg... But I guess like always in life you can't have everything.

Sebastian

Frank Blome

Thanks Sebastian,

This is exactly what I mean. There are many things you can do with Merlin Project which aren't expected.

To answer your question: You can export any Netplan (incl. the Org Chart) into several formats. The preferred format is PDF because of its quality. You know, PDF is also not too shabby for using in the web.

But I am not sure where you did found the SVG 🤔

sebgraf

Sorry, what I meant was a pdf. I exported the org charts as a pdf. And this is good for me, however I have to export like 10 pdfs to show only parts of the org tree (one for each top level department) which is why I was looking for a functionality like the export of a gantt chart in HTML were you can drill up and down in the browser. But never mind, I am more than fine with what I have :-)

Greetings

Sebastian

Frank Blome

Have you thought about printing the PDF on just one page? When you show it to others you can zoom in your PDF- or Acrobat Viewer.

sebgraf

Yes, this is what I do currently. But keep in mind... 1000+ Objects in the Org Chart :-)