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How does SummaryPro work?

UPDATING AN EXISTING SUMMARY

Updating an existing plan simply requires that you copy in the normal table of information, press a button to update the Excel engine, close excel and open the matching Visio plan and press another button.  You can now save, print or copy/paste the summary.  So much faster and simpler than manually checking for changes and moving boxes around!

Producing a new Plan on a Page

When you set up the summary plan you tag items in your detailed plan with a number from 1-200.  In the excel file you set what item 1 will be called on the summary plan, its vertical location on the page and formatting such as colour etc.  The excel file also controls the timeline, swim lanes, plan size, whether you want to see information on critical path / baseline / milestone references / RAG and progress data.  You then copy in the raw plan data, run the report and review the result.  Make any changes (for instance maybe a task name doesn’t fit and needs to be changed or add comments to the plan) and re-run the update.

Templates

When you want another report you simply copy a report pair, make any changes to the settings, copy in the new data and produce a new report.  This means that SummaryPro is built around templates; if you have a 'look' that you like simply copy that pair and most of the work is already done.