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Posted by Andy Brice
Jul 3, 2025 at 01:46 PM
>PerfectTablePlan?
>Please, tell us more about it :-)
It isn’t very CRIMPY! Basically a table planner for seated events:
https://www.perfecttableplan.com/
Underneath the UI it does some fairly hardcore combinatorial optimization using a genetic algorithm.
I’ve been working on it for 20 years now.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/02/21/20-years-working-on-the-same-software-product/
But most event planners are still using Excel. :0)
Posted by Franz Grieser
Jul 3, 2025 at 02:48 PM
Andy Brice wrote:
>PerfectTablePlan?
>>Please, tell us more about it :-)
>
>It isn’t very CRIMPY! Basically a table planner for seated events:
>
>https://www.perfecttableplan.com/
Puh, no need for crimping :-D
Thanks for the info.
Posted by Amontillado
Jul 3, 2025 at 03:53 PM
Happy to share, but it’s not rocket science.
The properties I use are Title, Status, Due, Cycle, Priority, and Budget. Setting the bin size to month for Due helps, and the colors for Due walk from dark green (hit the snooze button) to bright red (no, curses, no!) based on the current date.
The Cards view is where I pretty much live.
Columns are arranged by Due, rows by Cycle (week, month, quarter, yearly, semiannual, and other). In cell, arranged by due.
Show total is for the Budget property.
What’s really cool is when I filter by “before next payday” or “the next 3 weeks,” I get budget totals for just the cards that fit the filter.
When I pay a bill, I right click the card and use the shift date feature to kick it down the road to the next billing period. The budget totals all self adjust, keeping me advised of how much I need to survive the filtered period.
HyperPlan will also work great as an array of checklists. I have projects come up that require tasks performed on a large number of servers. A hundred or more.
Import the list into HyperPlan, setting a status property with predefined values, in order, for the steps required.
View as cards, columns by status. Filter to block cards with status set to Done.
As a step gets done on a system, drag it a column to the right. When you set the status to Done, the system disappears from the grid.
Many variations on that theme are possible. I like HyperPlan for this because it takes longer to describe the setup than it does to do it.
I could, of course, do all that in Excel. If I did so, though, I’d lose the easy drag and drop and the nice graphical display and I’d also lose being able to keep an automatically timestamped log for each system in individual Notes fields.
Nice, too, there’s a global Notes field, also with optional timestamping.
Even better, all the pivoting is completely live. Last I looked, Excel’s pivot tables are static snapshots that don’t update with data edits.
Drewster wrote:
>
>Amontillado wrote:
>I use HyperPlan daily as a control panel and running budget for bills as
>>they come due, and it’s really cool for creating an instant multi-mode
>>checklist for things like server maintenance. Nothing falls through the
>>cracks.
>
>You can’t just say something like this about HyperPlan and not give
>details! I’m fascinated by how you have set up the bill budget
>dashboard! What are your pivots?
Posted by Franz Grieser
Jul 3, 2025 at 09:03 PM
Andy Brice wrote:
>PerfectTablePlan?
>>Please, tell us more about it :-)
>
>It isn’t very CRIMPY! Basically a table planner for seated events:
>
>https://www.perfecttableplan.com/
>
>Underneath the UI it does some fairly hardcore combinatorial
>optimization using a genetic algorithm.
>
>I’ve been working on it for 20 years now.
>https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/02/21/20-years-working-on-the-same-software-product/
II just read the blog post.
That’s incredible: A business based on such a specialized software.
Even more impressive: 60,000 copies sold.
Wow. Hats off!