We finished out Project Libre course. The first will run Saturday, November 18, in San Juan Capistrano. We were able to pretty much replicate our standard Microsoft Project Basic course. There were some features that Project Libre lacked but for the most part it does, in fact, provide the expected capabilities. It also uses the ribbon so the interface is familiar. You can see the slide deck for the course below. It is based on our similar Microsoft Project course. Note we have since renumbered the course as PRJ111XL.

Prj101xl Project Libre Basic Training from Dan D'Urso

Project Libre Tutorial

The following is a simple little Project Libre tutorial you may find useful. It has 5 parts. It just takes a few minutes per part.

Project Libre Tutorial

Project Libre Resource View

Below is a screenshot of the of the resource sheet views in both Microsoft Project and Project Libre. As can be seen they are virtually identical. We will cover the Project Libre resource sheet in more detail in later posts in this series. The green shading in the Libre view means that the resources have been assigned in this project. Note that the screenshots are both of the same  ".mpp" file. Project Libre can read and write Microsoft Project files.

Click to expand view on box.com

Project Libre

We are preparing a new Project course based on Project Libre. This is free, open-source project management software that can read and write Microsoft Project files. Our course will parallel our Microsoft Project courses as much as possible. I will try to post our slides and/or comparison slides as we go along. This should prove interesting to those interested to see how compatible they are. Click the image below to see an expanded version on box.com. It shows the basic Gantt Chart view of Project Libre compared to Microsoft Project.

Changing Timescale in Project Libre

We are going to develop a new Project course based on the open source Project Libre. As with Python we did not find any suitable courseware manuals so we are developing our own. I downloaded Libre the other day and opened up one of our little Microsoft Project exercise files. As advertised it opened perfectly in Project Libre. Right away I noticed little differences: no auto-schedule/manual schedule, no dropdowns for duration, no question mark in the duration column, etc. The one that that was a little annoying was the lack of an obvious way to change the timescale in the Gantt chart. After a little searching on the internet I found one way is to use the zoom in and out commands on the resource tab. By the way, notice I said tab. Project Libre uses the same now familiar Icon Bar user interface that Microsoft Office uses. Below is a screenshot for changing the timescale.