OK get your act together - The new formula

I know it has been a while. Work work work, but 2007 Work which is good. The more I become familiar with Project Server 2007 the more I love and hate it :)
Lets talk about fomulas. The way formulas worked in 2003 was based on MS Project Professional and it was ok to use. you had many different ways to generate formulas and show traffic lights etc.
The way 2007 works is that you will actually need to have enter the formula using the web client. That sounds generally good BUT you need MS Project in order to validate the formula. Why did you take it out of Project Professional in the first place ??? OK OK I know the answer to this, that is due the the new funcitonality of custom fields. ( Which I like, just a shame that is is much slower to use then in 2003, but that is just the way it is.)

what I did discover is that you now have variations to formulas and need to use the WSS formulas. Here is an example: This one displays if the finish date is on time or not. Plesae note the AND statement that we had to use to make this work:

IIf([Baseline Finish]=ProjDateValue("NA"),"No Baseline",IIf([Current Date]>[Baseline Finish],"Late Delivery",IIf([Actual Finish]<>ProjDateValue("NA") And [Actual Finish]>[Baseline Finish],"Delivered Late",IIf([Finish]>[Baseline Finish],"Possible Delay","On Time"))))

I then integrated the Traffic lights and it seems to work . The AND was used differently in the last release and makes 2007 "New" meaning I ( and you ) will have to get used to the new way of formulas.
PS: some fields dont work = e.g. Active Risks and Active Issues do not work, meaning that you cannot generate a formula based on these fields. Now that is a shame :)