Project Reporting
On the GTD-MIndManager Yahoo Group, Rob asked:
One area I have always struggled is in creating an effective report, this is becoming a major issue as due to a change of manager I now have to submit these weekly. I’d like to be able to produce a report showing all active projects and some form of summary \ status. I need to submit this in word or excel as the person I’m reporting into is not a fan of mapping to put it mildly. I appreciate the above is vauge but I would appreciate any suggestions or ideas on how anyone is acheiving anything similair,
Hi Rob — I thought it might make more sense to answer here on the blog as the group can use the comments to brainstorm towards a solution for you.
One trick is to create a status “task” for each project and tag it with a “status” category. This will allow you to select for it in your reporting dashboard. You will also have to exclude these “next actions” from your routine dashboards with Category=”NOT Status” filters. The next trick you can use it to make use of the map2table macro to convert a dashboard to an html table. This macro is actually one of the most useful on the site and I find use for it every week or so. The long name for this macro is “Map to List Person” :-). If you can conceptualize how you want the tabular report to look, I’m sure a dashboard can be built to route through map2table.
Finally, if you want to try to include completed activities/projects in a dashboard, you need to toggle the “include already completed activities” to yes temporarily. That is a bit tedious and can’t be automated, so I personally haven’t gone down that road. It might also take some tweaking to filter for recent completions.
Entries 
Mal said,
February 8, 2008 @ 6:07 am
Another way to think about might be to build a project summary dashboard that collects all the relevant projects along the lines described by AO. If your manager is anti mapping then I assume a word document would be the preferred mechanism so you could use the Word export facility to export it all to a word template. Also exporting icons and notes should be able to provide all the information necessary.
Unfortunately it doesn’t yet seem that MM has upgraded the Word 2007 add-in (available from Mindjet Labs for MM6) to work with MM7. That would allow any changes made in the word document to be realised in the originating map.
Like everything there are a couple of different ways to achieve the end result.