Month: September 2016

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How to Produce a Change Log

Projects with Large Amounts of Data

Ensuring that the recently created data isn’t too difficult to find can be very important for businesses. Especially when trying to review projects. But how would you be able to find this relevant data without having to scroll through endless amounts of information?

Most projects need to review what has changed over a period of time, often the past month. These reports are typically called change logs.

Using a change log enables you to set up some instructions to only find data within a set period of time. You can;

– Run a query that finds all items whose last modification date is between the start of last month and the end of last month
– Display the results using a view that displays the change history, shown either as a summary or in full detail

To find the modified items, use the ‘Dates’ tab in the query definition and set the start and end dates. There are several choices

– Today
– Start of this week
– Start or end of last week
– Start or end of last month
– Start or end of 2 months ago
– Start or end of 3 months ago
– A specified date

To view the modified items, you can design a view, or use the Automatic scope view ‘XXX – History’ created by Cradle. Here XXX is your item type, so for an item type called issue, Cradle will have created the view ISSUE – History. This view shows the items’ identity, name, key and full details of the changes.

Running the query with this view produces the change log, as shown in the figure. By using relative dates (such as ‘Start of last month’) you will never need to change the query, it will work correctly every month.

You could combine the query and view into a report, and then add a shortcut to this report into your phase hierarchy or into a start page. Remember to save the query and report as Project scope, so that they are available to everyone in your project!

Change Log
Querying on item(s) modified last month

Article Updated 30/01/2019 – Added introduction

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How Not to Ruin Your Project With Office Tools

Scenario

Your project is running and you have little time to finish it.

You need documents for customer sign-off.

Everyone has Office installed, so you do the engineering with Word® and Excel®, and perhaps a little PowerPoint® or Visio® for the complex diagrams.

When you finish, not only is the work done, but you have the documents for approval. So you’ve solved two problems at once, completing the work and documenting it!

Unfortunately, no, you haven’t.

What you have done is to lay the foundations for major difficulties later on, and until the problem is recognised and fixed, the mistake will become larger and more costly.

Your work is locked into documents and the information is:

  • Not centralised, so changes in one document are not automatically made elsewhere
  • Inconsistent, you have no single point of truth
  • Not traceable, so you do not know what is linked, and what is not linked Inflexible, if documents or their structures change, you have serious problems

The Solution

Separate the data from the document.

Watch this short video: https://youtu.be/bgiQQ0N8bV4
and visit www.threesl.com for details of Cradle, the simple, flexible and scalable solution for your entire project that you can deploy in one week!

From concept to creation, you, Cradle and 3SL!

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More Drawing Area

Need more space to see your diagram?

Closing the sidebar and the ‘Diagram Form Item details’ can leave more drawing area on your screen. Double clicking the ribbon will close this up too. Clicking the sidebar icons opens the sidebar once again or the ribbon title opens the ribbon. Performing all these actions will increase the drawing area to the maximum.

how to get More Drawing Area
More Drawing Area
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Avoid Problems Comparing Versions of Formal Documents

Most Cradle users publish documents. Many users publish formal documents. When a formal document is published, Cradle:

– Increments a version number for that document, each formal document can exist in many versions
– Keeps a permanent copy of the document in the database
– Updates a register of formal documents with the title, issue, issue date and reference of the new version of the formal document
– Keeps a record of which item instances have been published in that version of that document, so if an item is to be changed, you can see the documents where it has been published so you know which formal documents need to be reissued

You can compare versions of formal documents. This uses Word’s document compare feature that shows the changes between the formal document versions with change bars, underlined and strikethrough text.

But, Word has a problem comparing large and/or complex tables in such documents. This problem affects Word 2007, 2010, 2013 and, we suspect, 2016. You will see the problem as a small dialog with the message ‘Word was unable to compare the documents’.

There is a solution to this problem that works for Word 2007, 2010, 2013 and, we expect, 2016. The solution is to create a new key in your definitions in the Windows registry. You may be able to edit the registry, or it may be limited to your IT. Be careful if you edit the registry as you can seriously damage Windows.

The solution is:

– Start regedit, for example, press Windows+R, enter: regedit and click OK
– Find the key: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\<office version>\Word\Options
Where <office version> is 12.0 for 2007, 14.0 for 2010, or 15.0 for 2013
– Select: Edit -> New, and choose: DWORD (32-bit) value
– Enter the name for the new key: DocCompareLargeTables
– In the regedit UI, select the new key, right click, choose Modify, enter the value: 1 and click OK
– Close regedit

We hope that this is helpful!

Cradle Document Publisher

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Cradle Exception for Popup Blocker

Many people access Cradle through a web browser, either using one of 3SL’s web UIs or a custom web UI that has been created in-house by their organisation. In all cases, when you login to a I, that web UI will be shown in a new windows, a popup.

Since popups are often used to display irritating advertising or offensive content, all web browsers have controls to optionally block popups.

Please ensure that you allow the Cradle Web Server (CWS) to display popups, or you will not be able to view Cradle web UIs!

The normal way to do this is to add the CWS as an exception in the popup blocker rules in your web browser’s settings. Each browser has its own method for doing this. In Firefox, select Options and Content. The exception will be the URL of your CWS, such as:

http://cradle.intranet.mycompany.com:8015

Cradle exception for pop-up blocker

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Re-Tracing Your Steps – the History Sidebar

The History sidebar is a useful productivity aid that is available in WorkBench in all Cradle products. It remembers what you did:

– Today
– Yesterday
– In the past 7 days
– In the past 30 days
– Older than 30 days

so you can quickly and easily repeat these actions by clicking nodes in the history. It remembers:

– Items that you opened in forms, including saved Hierarchy Diagrams (HIDs)
– Queries, reports, graphs, matrices and metrics that you used
– Phase hierarchy nodes that you used, including those that run commands or publish documents

The History sidebar is so useful that you may want it to be the default sidebar when you start WorkBench. If so, select Edit -> Preferences and choose UI Control and select the Sidebar tab. Here you can also:

– Enable or disable histories, or only record a history for the current WorkBench session
– Specify the maximum number of entries in the history list
– Control whether old entries in the history will be automatically purged

Please experiment with the History sidebar and tell us what you think about it as comments in this discussion!

History Sidebar