Recently, I inherited a project, which is already running. Everything had been planned by somebody else. So, actually, everything should be fine. But, the more I get into it, the more difficulties occur.

What I want to do is writing down my experiences, so I can use them, if I ever start my own project.

First experience:

If you plan the project, you need to start with defining the work-packages. All necessary work-packages need to be defined. Try not to forget any.
After this, you need make a time schedule for these workpackages. You can use MS-Project for this. At least, you should use a tool, which is capable of planning everything: costs, time-schedule, resources. Because after this, you will need to control your project with this tool.

Where does this experience come from? In my project, the time schedule and the cost-calculation consists of different work-packages. So, you can not compare the planned costs to your progress of the project and the real costs, which you can get out of SAP.

Conclusion: Never introduce different work-packages in your time-schedule and your cost-calculation!

How do you define the sides of an electric motor?

DE - drive end side (freies Motorwellenende)
This is the side, where the coupling to the work-machine is attached.

NDE - non drive end side
This is the side, where no coupling can be attached. There’s usually only the bearing shield.

If you want an parameter to be optional in a VBA-procedure, you have to declare it as Optional.

It should look like this:

sub your_sub(first_value, Optional second_value)
‘your code here
end sub

After I had done nothing - as usual - Excel did not show a context-menu after right-click on a cell.

The reason are some strange settings in Excel11.xlb. As soon as you have copied this file from a collegue, Excel will be back to full functionality.

The file is located:

C:\Documents and Settings\Your_Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel

Aus welchem Grund auch immer kann es in Excel vorkommen, dass kein Kontext-Menü erscheint. (Nach Rechtsklick auf eine Zelle.)

Ursache ist eine defekte Excel11.xlb. Sobald man diese mit einem Kollegen ausgetauscht hat, funktioniert Excel wieder wie gehabt.

Speicherort der Datei:

C:\Documents and Settings\Ihr_Username\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel