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Increasingly, project teams are spread over many sites making it difficult to effectively present updates and discuss issues.

A low-cost solution is now available using online technology so that project teams can meet to discuss and share ideas without the cost and time overhead of onsite meetings.

GoToMeeting is designed to show whatever is on the presenter’s screen to the meeting participants, control can be passed to any participant at any time. In a project review, for example, a manager could present the latest revisions to a project Plan in MS Project enabling the participants to understand and comment.

GoToMeeting incoprorates an Instant Messenger ‘chat’ facility but is better supplemented by traditional teleconference facilities to bring live audio to the visuals.

Despite the wealth of functionality, GoToMeeting is incredibly low-cost to run with a flat monthly fee - enabling you to hold as many online conferences as you want without hitting extra charges

Try the link below for a FREE 30 day trial:

If you manually enter a start date or an end date for a task, Project changes the constraint type for that task to ‘Start No Earlier Than’ or ‘Finish No Earlier Than’.

These constraint types force the task to start or end on the specified date regardless of subsequent changes that would automatically schedule the task’s place in the overall project plan. This behaviour confuses many new users to Project.

Change the constraint type back to the default, ‘As Soon As Possible’ and Project will adjust the dates for the task optimally in relation to the project plan as a whole.

Graham Perry

Circulating MS Project plans and updates to various stakeholders can be very time consuming as many people don’t have Project installed and you either have to print your plan out or do a bit of creative cutting and pasting into a word document before emailing.

Here’s a time-saving idea that I have been using for a while which exports your plan as a PDF document - readable by anyone who has Adobe Reader. It is easily emailed and, what’s more, it is free!

PrimoPDF is a free conversion tool that converts any document that can be printed into PDF format. Download it for free from here. It doesn’t introduce any popups onto your system and has never caused any problems in the 2 years I’ve been using it.

Once installed you can create a PDF file from your MS Project document by clicking File - Print  and when the printer window comes up, select the pull down arrow on the printer select field and select “Primo PDF” from the list and click OK.

A window will then pop up - pick the location you want to save it to and name your file (leave the resolution setting to Screen) and click OK.

When the document has been created Primo will preview it on your screen. You are then free to email it

Graham Perry