Assigning tasks in the Project Plan

Question

When assigning tasks within a stage of the project plan is it possible to globally assign certain chapters to one translator and others to another. I know I can assign the whole stage to one person but that's not what's needed. Rather, supposing a stage has 20 tasks, I may want to assign all 20 task to Translator 1 for the odd chapters of the book and all 20 tasks to Translator 2 for the even chapters. As far as I can tell I have to go to the first task and manually assign the odd chapters to Translator 1 then the even chapters to Translator 2, then repeat the process for task 2, and again for 3 and again for 4 and again for 5 and again.....20. It's very tedious Then the same for all the other stages. Repeat for every book.  Surely there's a more efficient way. What am I missing?

Answer 1

I'm not aware of an easy way to do this, but it can speed things up if you assign the task to user 1, then click on the chapter box and uncheck the odd (or even) that you don't want assigned to user 1. When you click to assign user 2, they will automatically get the rest of the chapters.

Answer 2

As Phil says, there isn't an easy way to do this. Probably because it isn't necessarily considered a good way to do things. 

I am interested to know what the thinking is behind assigning alternative chapters. And whether you have thought through what you really want to do, or have you sought advice from your consultant.

Have you considered the following?

• Drafting really needs to be done by one person for the whole book so that it comes out with one "voice". Alternating from one person to another would be hard to keep it consistent.
• Checks are usually run on the whole book as well. So it may not be easy to correct every alternative chapter. Though my quick test shows that Paratext seems to cope with that, but rather than reducing the workload I wonder if it would probably double the workload.
• Then there are all the tasks that are not chapter-based.
• Then a translation is done over many years and often the team members change. So you don't want to do assign the whole New Testament at once. I think that may be one reason the Priorities feature was introduced. I would suggest that you define priorities and then do the assigning and copying assignments one priority at a time.

You will be pleased to know that there is a "Copy assignments" feature on the Assignments and Progress menu. Once you have done the assignments for one book, then you can copy them to other books.

I hope this helps.