advice needed

[NigelH]

I perform project management work and so host many many meetings. Currently I have a document with many tabs, one tab per meeting. NM does a great job of planning and running meetings etc.

But I am finding that having multi tabs cumbersome to scroll back and forth, especially when I have to reference a previous meeting etc, and the document is growing and growing. 
I have tried separating into multi docs, but find that cumbersome and not what I need.

My question, how do you handle situations where you will have many tabs in one document?

Any advice would be great.

thanks

Nigel.

[olaf_gy]

Hi Nigel,

very interesting question, I do similar work. Actual the maps and number of tabs are not so many that I had the need to split.

I thought about how I would solve your issue.

Typically you have different phases in a project, e.g. design, implementation, testing, deployment, etc. I would try to organise the "master" map by this phases and hold in the "master" general information on the project. So for each phase I would generate an separate file in which I can organise the meetings in tabs. The overall number of tabs in each map is hopefully reduced and can be tracked. The pity is that links to other maps cannot point to an individual tab in the file.
Substructures for the meeting maps could also be build by audience, e.g. SteerCo Meeting, Customer, meetings, internal status meetings, etc. In the first map of such sub-maps I would generate one tab with an overview map, which give a short info on each meeting and a link to the detail tab.

Olaf


PS: Patrick, I think this is a topic of general interest, maybe you can move it to the General section.

[NigelH]

thanks Olaf..."I would generate one tab with an overview map, which give a short info on each meeting and a link to the detail tab."

I'm gonna see what this suggestion can do for me.  Thanks for the reply.

I'd be interested if you have any other thoughts, or anyone else...if I come up with another solution, I will also post.  I agree that this would be general interest.

thanks!!

[jakevettori]

thanks for the info

[daisy]

That's also what I knew.

[Navigator72]

Working in a similar manner, I find two things helpful:
1) The master Map, with internal hyperlinks to other topics
2) hyperlinks to other project documents. Typically, I have a running Excel workbook and PowerPoint document that also contain project related material

In a few cases, I use Merlin project management software for designing and tracking work plans, but generally the internal schedule / responsibility assignments in NM are sufficient.