Work Task Scheduler

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My wife is looking for a simple scheduler for work. Something that she could use to track tasks and activities, start dates, completion status and person assigned the task. Someone suggested that she could use MS Project, but that is like using a sledge hammer to drive nails. It also has a significant learning curve for someone who does not know Project Management. Any insight anyone can provide will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Ron M

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Tasks in Outlook maybe enough for her needs. Look in Outlook help under “Using Tasks”.

An alternative is to cook up something to suit with Excel, or you could hunt for something pre-built.

You’re right about MS Project being overkill for simple needs. The effort to learn it is a minor project in itself. The same goes for any other serious PM tool. I’ve found the lightweight ones typically still too complex for simple needs, lacking in capacity and unrelaible.

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Her organization does not use Outlook. She has to check to see if it is even on her machine. Cowboydawg, that C-Organizer looks good. I still maintain that she could use an Excel spreadsheet to do what she wants. If I new a little more VBA, I could probably set one up for her, you know, automate some of the input data stuff and maybe some reporting. I still might try to do this.

As I indicated in my initialpost, what she needs is really simple.

Ron M

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Sounds like the perfect learning opportunity! From what you’ve described the nitial version could be just plain Excel, and you could add the bells and whistles progressively, stretching out the brownie points to the max.

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Ron,
You could look at Time & Chaos. It is reasonably inexpensive. I’ve not used it for a few years since we migrated to Office but it used to be quite good.

Joe

--Joe

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Joe, I second your recommendation of Time & Chaos. It combines flexibility with ease of use; a great combo in my book.

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If what your looking for is a PIM with calendaring/scheduling, you might want to have a look at the Palm Desktop. This is the software with which Palm handhelds sync, but the handheld isn’t required. It’s a fine application in it’s own right. It’s very similar to Outlook, but with no email. You can find it here.

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