From his office in north-west London, Don Jones project manages the installation of £21 million worth of process plant in Guinness Breweries at points as far afield as north-west Ireland to north-west Africa.

Starting out in 1963 with a time share from a mainframe bureau service, he has now clocked up considerable project planning experience with one particular PC package. Computeriine's Plantrac. 'I've been using it virtually every day for the last ten years.' He will agree thaT some people say it is difficult to use. but with the proviso that this is more because it is so rich in functionality rather than inherently awkward to use. 'It's a huge package.'

This is no exaggeration. Plantrac can handle up to half a million different project activities. It calculates time and resource schedules across single or multiple sites, can track items or cash movements, or show trends and resource clashes or plot the complex weave of project activities and their dependencies. It will produce graphical reports in many forms to either printer or plotter.

Its strength is in its report writing* claims Jones. 'It has a huge variety of standard reports, and customisation opens up even greater possibilities' - this includes tabular prints or bar charts designed to suit, plus an extensive library "of predefined reports for regularly used but highly tailored reports. It will report project activities by time, by number, by resource; the permutations seem endless.

Against these yardsticks, Jones reckons few packages will match the performance of Plantrac. 'Software like Instaplan. PMW, Advance or Superproject Expert don't appear to give such a wealth of reports. Even top end systems like Artemis and Cresta will handle much fewer activities. Cresta will deal with only as many as 32,000 activities.'

But while report writing and planning capacity are the most obvious factors to include in a list of software selection criteria, there are others that are equally important, he adds. For example:

How is the project network built up? Some packages are strongest in only arrow or precedence notations. So look for software that wiD deal with both ways of working. Is it easy to get started? Lots of packages now come in versions intended for beginners (Computerline has two starter kits known as Easyplan and Baronet). This will give users a real feel for a system, as well as provide a stepping stone on to the full blown version. Can a project plan be easily changed once it has been run? Some software sequentially tags each activity with an id number; others that use incremental numbering (Plantrac uses steps of five) means project plan updates and amendments to activities dr. easily be taken in without having to renumber a!: the activities subsequent to a change/insertion. Similarly, some packages limit the description of resources or activities to an uncomfortable number of characters, the best will allow up to 50 characters. And finally, is the software's development supported by an active user group?