I think the perspective of Primavera from moving from a "project-based" system to a "program-based" or "enterprise-based" one should be considered.

During P3 days, people used to deal with "disconnected projects". However, even in P3, you’d have project groups and projects. If you adjust your perspective to this "project group/projects", you’d see that the enterprise version is the same -- albeit more powerful.

As for layouts, I think that it is assumed that you have to tidy up how you define your layouts. Defining layouts "on-the-fly" will create numerous layouts and will make life hard for the user with all the clutter. Try sitting back and define your standard layouts. This way, no matter which project you’re working on, it would be easy to pull-out a layout.

As for switching back and forth on projects, (as you know) you can open multiple projects at the same time. What I do is that I define multiple filters so that I can focus on one project at a time while working on a program (group of projects). This way, my screen is unclutterd with multiple projects.

I still think the P5 is much easier to use -- like you can have long activity descriptions, resource codes/descripions, etc.

My only single problem is the need to always adjust print layouts (which is a time waster). But this is another topic.

Hope this helps.

I find that right mouse click collapse all, select the project I want project and right click expand all is easier than scrolling through a the activities. Depends of current view and layout settings but works for me.

HTH

Frank Borcherdt

I have no solution either in V5.

Another way of working that I know was used in V4, was that some users used two differents users name and it was easy to change of user ("File _ Login as different user" if I remember) ; it was easy to switch for one to another one. This is also no more possible.