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Manage Multi-Person Excel Projects with BaseCamp BaseCamp is an amazing new collaboration tool. I've been using BaseCamp for several weeks and I am not sure how I ever lived without it. Anyone can set up a free personal BaseCamp site to manage 1 project, but I actually signed up for the $24 per month plan that allows up to 15 live projects simultaneously. Let me describe BaseCamp to you. When you sign up for a BaseCamp account, you become the primary person for your group. You can customize your BaseCamp with your logo, slogan, and colors. You are allowed to add projects and authorize people to view each project. Note: I heard the BaseCamp founders in a radio interview. Their motto? "Our product does less". They are all for simple-to-use products. I love this philosophy. To create a new project, you click the link for "Create a new project".
Next, give the project a name.
The BaseCamp site then offers tabs for overview, messages, To-Do, Milestones, Writeboards, Files, People, and Search.
A good place to start is to record two milestones. Again - the application walks you through what to do.
Here are the two milestones.
It is time to bring some other people onboard. Go to the people tab. Adding people is easy.
When you enter their info, they automatically get an e-mail inviting them to sign-in to BaseCamp. You can set a person up to be able to view all projects or just this project.
Time to enter some To-Do's. They are easy to use. This particular to-do list is associated with the first milestone.
If you need to leave messages, you can do this. When I posted this message, I indicated that Josh should receive the message. He gets an e-mail with the message, but all of the team members can read the message. When Josh replied, he can post a comment with this message. Again, all of the team members can see what is going on.
You can upload any file that is 20MB or less. When you upload the file, check which people should be notified.
The Writeboard section of BaseCamp is a little different. You can type a document here and everyone can work on it. When someone makes edits to the document, you can easily compare the changes between any two versions.
The Overview tab is amazing. It shows what happened today, what happened yesterday, what happened last week. You can see who has logged in and when.
You can subscribe to an RSS Feed about the project. (If you don't know what RSS is, read my Intro to RSS
These guys at BaseCamp are amazing. I signed up for the $24 per month Basic plan. I had to give them my credit card to start, but they will not charge the card until 30 days later. I get to try out Basecamp. If I decide to leave before the 30 days, it was all free. I simply download all of my stuff in XML and I am on my way. (Of course, now that I've tried it, I can never imagine leaving it). My plan allows 15 active projects. When I am done with a project, I can mark it as "archived" and it does not count against my 15 projects. The example in this article is an Excel collaboration, but anytime that you have multiple people collaborating, BaseCamp is awesome. I have a project for our next book. I set up the author, the editor, the cover designer, the printer in BaseCamp. I listed the To-Do's. Where I used to be the gatekeeper for all of this stuff, the team can now work together even while I am out of the office. The editor has questions for the author and the editor just posts a message and directs it to the author. The printer needs the designer to change something and he asks for it on BaseCamp. The designer uploads the new file to the Files section. I get back to the office and I can see all of this stuff that happened while I was out of the office. If you have to manage projects, try BaseCamp.
To get started, visit BaseCamp.
This page originally published on January 22, 2006. The permanent URL for this page is http://www.mrexcel.com/tip118.shtml.
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