Looking Up external databases

You could embed a hyperlink on each task to a document describing the specific calculations. It should be possible to have a bookmark as part of the link so you could go directly to the appropriate discussion in your document. Whenever you wanted to display the justification, you’d just click on the hyperlink field for that task. It’s not a database, but it *is* a location where you can put arbitrarily complex descriptions.

Or the hyperlink could reference an HTML file on your machine. That HTML file would have the coding in it to access the database and display the contents.

You could actually connect to a database with some VBA though I’ve never tried that. The connection to the database would be non-trivial (but also well documented since I’m sure there are tens of thousands of times where people have used VBA to access a database) but, after that, the coding would be simple. So you would select the task and have a button that you could click on to launch the VBA which would access the database.

Note that in all cases, you would have to supply both the project schedule and, in the first instance the document; in the second case you’d need to supply the database, the database engine and the html page; in the third case, you’d need to supply the database and the database engine.

In short: technically - quite doable. The real issue is time: is your time as PM better invested in monitoring the project or better invested in overseeing an additional project deliverable. I’ve answered your question ... now you have to ponder your own answer to mine .

Thanks for that I will have to think on it.

Many Regards

Andrew