Reverend Conehead
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I’ve used Microsoft Project before at work to plan out the completion of a goal. I looked into buying it for my home PC, but holy bleep it’s expensive. $589 bucks. They can charge what the market will bear, of course, but I’m not willing to fork over that much money for it. So I looked around for more affordable alternatives and I found one named ProjectLibre. It’s a GNU freeware application, so you don’t have to pay a cent for it. The price is certainly right, but is it any good? I tried it out and found that it has all of the important features of Microsoft Project. It doesn’t have the fancy templates, but I can live without them. It’s written in Java, and (like most Java apps) it has a clunky looking non-standard interface. It’s not as slick as Microsoft Project, but to save me 589 bucks, I can live with that. Yes, I’m aware that it’s possible to pirate almost any proprietary software, but there are huge downsides to doing that. Obviously, that’s highly illegal. If you habitually pirate software, eventually you’ll get caught and you’ll be in deep doggie doo. You could also end up with malware, and there’s malware that can seriously hose your system. When there’s a legal alternative out there, to me it makes more sense to use that than to assume the risks of piracy.
I find project management software really helpful. You can break a goal down to all its micro-goals and have them all graphed on a timeline. I’m using ProjectLibre to set up a weight loss plan. You can use it for personal goals like that, or for professional goals. With a little planning, you can always know exactly where you are in pursuit of your goal. Both MS Project and ProjectLibre are extremely helpful tools, but the former just costs too much money, IMO. For some people, forking over the 589 bucks may be worth it. Maybe they use MS Project at work and are great at it, so it’s easiest to use the same program at home. However, for me the programs are so similar that there’s not much of a learning curve to use ProjectLibre at home, and it’s well worth saving almost 600 bucks. I can easily port files to and from MS Project as long as I save it as an XML file. I opened up one of my ProjectLibre files that I made on my home computer in MS Project at work, and it opened flawlessly. I was able to work on it and bring it home and continue working on it in ProjectLibre. There were no compatibility issues whatsoever.
I use a lot of GNU freeware, most notably LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. It’s not that I’m against companies selling software. If they can find a market for something, then by all means they can go for it. It’s just great that there’s an alternative to paying hundreds of dollars. I’ve never found LibreOffice lacking, and so far this ProjectLibre has proven worthy.
I find project management software really helpful. You can break a goal down to all its micro-goals and have them all graphed on a timeline. I’m using ProjectLibre to set up a weight loss plan. You can use it for personal goals like that, or for professional goals. With a little planning, you can always know exactly where you are in pursuit of your goal. Both MS Project and ProjectLibre are extremely helpful tools, but the former just costs too much money, IMO. For some people, forking over the 589 bucks may be worth it. Maybe they use MS Project at work and are great at it, so it’s easiest to use the same program at home. However, for me the programs are so similar that there’s not much of a learning curve to use ProjectLibre at home, and it’s well worth saving almost 600 bucks. I can easily port files to and from MS Project as long as I save it as an XML file. I opened up one of my ProjectLibre files that I made on my home computer in MS Project at work, and it opened flawlessly. I was able to work on it and bring it home and continue working on it in ProjectLibre. There were no compatibility issues whatsoever.
I use a lot of GNU freeware, most notably LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office. It’s not that I’m against companies selling software. If they can find a market for something, then by all means they can go for it. It’s just great that there’s an alternative to paying hundreds of dollars. I’ve never found LibreOffice lacking, and so far this ProjectLibre has proven worthy.