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May 24, 2006

Changing Cell background color in Microsoft Project

Yes, along with multiple undo, the ability to format cells with a background color and pattern will be here in Project 2007 which has an expected release date sometime in early 2007. The Beta2 release was yesterday and a new SDK was released (find it here).

I'll be working through this stuff over the coming weeks, but some of the best things are the simple ones. For example this bit from the table of VBA Object Model Changes:

Cell, CellColor property, CellColor as PjColor

New for Cell object. Background color of the cell. In Project 2003 as GroupCriterion property only.

Cell, FontColor property, FontColor as PjColor
New for Cell object. Foreground color of the cell font. In Project 2003 as GroupCriterion property only.

Cell, Pattern property, Pattern as PjBackgroundPattern

New for Cell object. Background pattern of the cell. In Project 2003 as GroupCriterion property only.

Global, Application Font method Boolean Font(Optional Variant Name, Optional Variant Size, Optional Variant Bold, Optional Variant Italic, Optional Variant Underline, Optional Variant Color, Optional Variant Reset, Optional Variant CellColor, Optional Variant Pattern)

Changed: added parameters CellColor and Pattern.

See that? Cells have colors and patterns. Welcome to 1995! Now to install the beta and see if we are still limited to 16 colors...

PS: Don't take the 1995 comment too harshly. From the other new things in Project Server 2007 it is clear that the team has focused on solid improvements to functionality

Posted by Jack at 10:03 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

May 15, 2006

Exercising Influence - Cockroach scented robots

This probably belongs on my other site (http://zo-d.com/stuff/) but I haven't added anything here for a while...and I want to keep my readers entertained. Anyway, apparently someone has invented a sort of pied piper for cockroaches. A tiny robot doused with cockroach pheromones which can dare the other cockroaches into outrageous (for them) behavior. The article can be found here; http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/dn9136.html. The first thing that came to mind when I read this was human teenagers...

Posted by Jack at 11:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 02, 2006

Microsoft Project 2007 Example Project Templates

Lidiane's Microsoft Project 2007 Blog announces some of the new templates to be included in Proj 2007. From the titles you can see that the targets are getting deeper into HR, Marketing, IT and Legal areas. I hope these templates are more useful than the ones in earlier versions. My opinion is that they are so basic that they might almost be dangerous - dangerous in the sense that an inexperienced user might mistakenly follow them line for line. But, I'll not talk anymore about that. I'm an inexperienced users with many other software tools. Here is the list so far announced:

Posted by Jack at 06:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Adding tasks to MS Project using C#

Eric Landes has a brief code snippet on using C3 to automate project here:Corporate Coder : Project 2003 Adding Tasks via C#

All I can say is that C# is slightly less than elegant in the way it handles optional parameters.
For what an idea of what I'm talking about, here is how to invoke FileOpen:
m_ProjectProApp.FileOpen ( "MyProjectName", missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, PjPoolOpen.pjDoNotOpenPool, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue, missingValue);
Just a bit awkward, wouldn't you say?

Posted by Jack at 06:19 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack