Open Source Software Trail

Open source software provides choice, which is a good thing, but comes with the cost that you have to evaluate the different alternatives before finding out which one offers the features that you are interested in.  And it is probably the case that you have one set of desired features in one alternative and a different set of features in another alternative!  (Time for the OSS projects to share?)

I recommended Open Proj to a friend (i had found it myself through alternativeto.net) for project management charts design.  My friend used it and was quite happy with it until she had to write a document and needed include an OpenProj chart in that document.  My first instinct was to look at the ‘Save As’ menu for an export feature and found that it only offers two options, Serena (*.pod) format (projects on demand format - the paid version of OpenProj) and Microsoft Project 2003 (*.xml) format.  I tried the latter but only got a strange error message when I attempted to include it in a document.

Second option was to try and export the project as a PDF, however, the PDF export is only available in the Projects on Demand version, which is the commercial version of OpenProj.  (I am wondering why there are people still charging for PDF exports).  In any case she used a PDF printer to export the document but had a not-very-pretty output.

So basically this post is saying one thing.. if you want to use Open Proj and are intending to share or export your project charts to different formats/with other authors, then you better all be using Open Proj or look for another alternative that provides that feature.  Maybe I shall come around to looking at another project Open WorkBench to see what it offers.