Microsoft project 2013 basics pdf free

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Конечно, просить АН Б приложить руку к совершенствованию системы общего пользования – это все равно что предложить приговоренному к смертной казни самому сколотить себе гроб.

«ТРАНСТЕКСТ» тогда еще не был создан, и принятие стандарта лишь облегчило бы процесс шифрования и значительно затруднило АНБ выполнение его и без того нелегкой задачи. Фонд электронных границ сразу увидел в этом конфликт интересов и всячески пытался доказать, что АНБ намеренно создаст несовершенный алгоритм – такой, какой ему будет нетрудно взломать.

Чтобы развеять эти опасения, конгресс объявил, что, когда алгоритм будет создан, его передадут для ознакомления лучшим математикам мира, которые должны будут оценить его качество.

 
 

 

Microsoft project 2013 basics pdf free. Ms project tutorial

 

This course is designed to familiarize you with the advanced features and functions of Microsoft Project Professional so that you can use it effectively and efficiently in a real-world environment. By submitting this form, you are giving your express written consent for Global Information Technology to contact you regarding our programs and services using email, telephone or text.

In the beginning of this year I lost my job as a landscaping and gardening supply store operations manager when the store, Detroit Farm and Garden, went out of business. After reviewing the Web site and visiting a few of the institutions, I decided to enroll at Global Information Technology. I was impressed with this [ I want to thank Global Information Technology for assisting with my job search and training needs. I am very impressed with all my teachers, [ Manish — I am writing to say thank you.

I thank God for Global Information Technology. I thank God for you, because you genuinely care about the direction of the student. I thank God for believing in me, for coaching me, and for helping me. I thank God for everyone at Global Information Technology for [ My name is Willie M. Williams, I became unemployed after nine years of service to one of the big three companies in April The majority of my department ISS was terminated indefinitely. First I would like to thank GIT staff for all their support.

I had no IT experience and I was searching for a career that I enjoyed as well as one that would allow me to raise my two children as a single parent. At the time [ Generic selectors. Exact matches only. Search in title. Search in content. Search in excerpt. Search in posts. Search in pages. Global Information Technology is here for you!

Click here for Virtual or In-person Appointments. Take the Free Quiz. Microsoft Project Basic. What you will learn. Course content. Request Information! Who you are? Individual Veteran Business. First Name your first name. Last Name your last name. State pick one! Zip Zip. Email a valid email. Phone Number. Course pick one! Net 4.

Referred by pick one! Get A Quote! Success Stories Real testimonials from our Students! Address your address. City your full name. Zip : Only Numeric Zip. Do you agree? I agree to be contacted over email and phone. Get Info!

 
 

Microsoft project 2013 basics pdf free

 
 

You’d have numerous graphs, pages of notes, and copies would be made for everyone who had just the slightest part in the project. Nowadays, however, project management software can make managing and completing a project easier than ever before. Tracking the progress of a project is as easy as signing into the program. In fact, a good software program like MS Project can allocate resources, assign tasks, track budgets, and be your right hand as you manage the project from beginning to end.

That said, there are dozens of project management programs on the market today. Choosing the right one can be confusing because you want the best one for your company and your projects.

Microsoft Project is just one of those programs. While you may choose it because it is a familiar name, you should also choose it because it offers the insight and features that are common to all Microsoft products and will offer the aspects you need to complete any project within your company.

Microsoft Project is a project management software program created for businesses and freelance professionals to help better manage individual projects that occur within companies.

Although no project management software should be used to replace project management techniques or adequate training of management and staff, MS Project can and will improve the efficiency, organization, and sometimes even the speed of which a project is completed. Before you can begin to understand project management — or maybe even put this software to work for you — it is important that you comprehend the nature of projects, as well as what is or is not a project.

By definition, a project is a temporary endeavor that is completed to create a unique product or service. You will use MS Project to organize and manage any products that you or your company create.

Each project that you undertake will be made up of certain components. This holds true in MS Project The first component your project will have is tasks. Tasks are things that have to be accomplished in order for the project to be complete. Think of it as your to-do list that will get you from point A to point B. Your tasks can be as detailed or not as you want them to be. A task can be simply researching competition or it can be a phase of your project that contains a summary task as well as subtasks.

For example, if you are creating a new software program for your company, your task might be to research similar software. Subtasks might be researching businesses that have similar software, analyzing their sales, and then looking at their pricing models.

In Project , tasks are organized into phases, or stages. In the Gantt chart view of Project , you will be able to see your tasks, as well as an outline of the time it will take to complete those. Since timing is always going to be important to your project, MS Project allows you to set up and view the timing relationships upon tasks. You can also set dependencies.

A dependency will show that one task task A, for example must be completed before Task C can begin. Simply put, project management is defined as the process of managing all the elements of a project to complete it. This includes supplies, labor, financials, etc. It is a fact that project management is becoming increasingly important within companies in order for them to operate successfully and efficiently.

The skills that managers and employers are given during training to manage the day-to-day operations of a company are different than the ones they’ll need to manage individual projects. Successfully managing a project requires discipline. It requires that time, scope, and cost are managed in a way that bring about the completion of specific goals or a project itself. This requires planning and organization. Microsoft Project can help project managers and their staff organize their projects and meet their goals by acting as a virtual assistant that can produce information, charts, and reports to help the project smoothly advance through to completion.

There are three things that must be managed during a project. This will help you better understand what MS Project offers you and help you put the aspects of this software to work for you once we’ve learned how to use it. The first is cost. Cost is everything and anything that has to do with money related to your project. It includes people, equipment, material, profit, etc.

If anything costs or makes your company money in relation to a project, then it is factored into the cost. Next is time. The time used for the project is a sum of all the time used to complete tasks that lead to the completion of the project.

This can include employee time, equipment time, and even time to see profit. Finally, there is the scope. The scope of your project can also be referred to as the specifications for the project. The specifications or scope define what the final results are supposed to be.

Quality is a major part of the scope. That said, if your project is well managed, it delivers exactly what it was supposed to within the given time frame and without spending more money than allocated.

By managing the above three components using MS Project , it can be much easier to achieve. Project can be purchased one of two ways. You can purchase Project through Microsoft for a one-time charge.

However, if you do not want to fork out a large sum of money at once, you can also purchase a subscription of Project Pro through Office The subscription requires that you pay a monthly fee; however, you get all the benefits of Project with the subscription-based version. You can also download a free trial of MS Project if you just want to learn the software, but not purchase it — or if you want to try it before you buy it.

You can download a free trial of Project without downloading any of the other Office programs. Simply go to the Microsoft site and locate Project If you haven’t already, you will be asked to fill out a profile for Microsoft.

You will be asked for basic information, such as your name, address, and phone number. In addition, you will be asked some questions about your download requirements for Project Because downloading Microsoft Project is not always as simple as it seems, we are going to download the steps you need to follow below.

Fill out the profile information, such as your name, address, etc. Microsoft will as you if you want to download the 32 or 64 bit version of Project Be careful here.

You should select the one that matches any other versions of Office or Office programs that you have on your computer. You should not choose the one that matches your operating system. If you choose the wrong one, Microsoft will instruct you to uninstall other Office programs from your computer during the Project installation process. You do not want to have to do this. If you have Office , 32 bit is the default. Unless you specified 64 bit during your setup and installation of Office, you have 32 bit.

This means you will need to choose 32 bit for Project. Once you’ve finished your profile information, Microsoft will provide you with a product key to use for your free trial. The page will look like this:.

Make sure you either print this page or write down the product key. Then, select the download language, and click Download to download MS Project Unlike other software programs that you download to your computer that save as a zip file or unpack and install without saving the install files to your computer , Project, as well as the versions of Office that contain Project, will appear on your computer as an image file.

It will look like this:. Chances are, if your computer is running the Windows 8 or 8. Installation will not proceed when you see this message.

To mount the image file and install Project, right click on the image file again. This time, instead of selecting Mount from the context menu, select Copy.

Now, click elsewhere in the location where you have the image file for us, it is Desktop. Right click, then click Paste to paste the image file. We’ve pasted ours side by side in the snapshot below. Next, right click on the copy of the image file the one on the right in the snapshot above.

So with both of those settings click on OK and those changes will be saved. I have two languages setup. My default is English United States but I do switch between both of them because I do work in both languages and they are sufficiently different for me to treat them as different languages.

Choose your language and then you can set it as the default if you want to or you can have it set as an additional language. So they are the main options that you need to have set before we start. Trust Center is very important from the point of view of security. So you may find that if I do something in a particular way early on here you may prefer one of the ways that I show you later on.

So, on the start screen, Project , just click on Blank project. Project sequence later. But it does make a lot of sense to do things pretty much in the order that you intend to do them in the project.

A very simple way of entering a task into a project is to click in where it says Task name in the table part of the Gantt Chart View there. The first thing you notice is that a duration is added by Microsoft Project. It says One day, question mark, and also a start date appears. The way that my current installation is setup and probably the way that yours is setup is that by default, durations are assigned with this little question mark at the end, and what a question mark indicates is that this is an estimated duration.

Now by default here every task that I entered will have an estimated duration of one day. And what I need to do if I want a duration to be something different from that is to click in there and change that duration. All I need to do is to click in where it says Duration, and then I have these little roller controls on the right that I can use to step up or to step down the duration. And in fact, I can click in there and just type if I wanted.

So I could click to the right of five, hit the Backspace key to delete, and then just type 10 days. That now means that that task has a day duration. Now watch what happens. That particular task now shows a duration of 10 days in the Gantt Chart. It should be three weeks ago.

But as you can see, the positioning of this vertical line here, this separator between the table part and the chart part is not quite in a good place. I then note that the table itself, this column in the table is not quite wide enough. So, again if I hover over the top, get a vertical line with a couple of arrows, again just drag it a little bit to the right. So now back to what we were just doing. Now notice that with the date picker, I can move by months using those two little arrows here and then click on a date that I want.

It should have been Monday, March 4th. Now, note when I created this project Microsoft Project automatically assumes a start date for the whole project. This is before the project start date of Monday, March 25th. You can continue and move the task to start before the project start date or you can cancel and do not move the task. Now note that because of the time display here, I can now no longer see that task. If I go down to the scroll bar, the horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the Gantt Chart and just click a little bit off to the left, I can go back to see the bar for the first task in the project and there it is.

Now before we put in the second task in the project, there are a couple of things I want to point out.

One of them is task mode as you can see here. By default my system is setup to do automatically scheduled. So if I click in there, click on the drop down, note that it says Auto Schedule not manually scheduled. This is ID number one. We need to make sure we keep it safe. So, pretty simple to save a project. Project scratch files, your working files.

Click on Save and my project is safely saved on my computer. And then also if you look at the top of the screen, the title of the project has changed to House build You can see the ID highlighted on the left there. If I right click to get the contextual menu, then three or four items from the bottom one of the options is Information.

Click on Information and it brings up a very important dialog which is the Task Information dialog which contains all of the key information about any individual task in a project. Now there is a lot of information here.

The information is arranged into pages or tabs that are accessed using the tabs here. You can even setup Custom fields. The task has a name that we can change. It has a duration that we can change.

It has a little checkbox on the right here, Estimated, that indicates whether the duration is estimated or not. It has an indicator to show how complete the task is. A priority and then we can also see the start date and a finish date. So there we are. The Task Information dialog is very important. Let me just cancel that. Another way of bringing up the Task Information dialog is to just double click on the task and by default you get the Task Information dialog.

In the previous section, we started our project for building a house. We just put one task in, Prepare site, and I talked a little bit about duration, start date, etc. Click on that and it brings up a dialog, the Project Information dialog. Now effectively because I decided that I want to set this project a little bit in the past that I need to change the start date and you can always change the start date by going into Project Information and setting the start date here.

So click on that and my start date is now changed. So if we were building a house and we had a start date of March 4th , the chances are that our objective would be to finish building the house as soon as possible.

And one of the things that we would be using Microsoft Project for would be to help us to schedule the work on building the house which would enable us to finish as quickly as possible, get the house on the market, sell it, and get the money for it.

But there is another option and if you click on this one, the other option is project finish date and there are some projects where your objective is not to start now and finish as soon as possible but to start as late as possible with the objective of finishing on or by a particular date. Project maybe a company meeting, maybe an announcement to the press.

Your objective would be to finish by a certain date not to start on a certain date. Tell me how late I can leave my preparations. If I chose project finish date watch what happens. I now enter the finish date not the start date and Project will tell me when I need to start.

As it is with my project start date of March the 4th, Project tells me that currently my project will finish on March the 15th. First of all, the current date is in the top right. You can have a number of calendars associated with a project. For example, some of the people working on it may have their own working hours and may have their own calendars and some of the resources you use may also have their own calendars as well.

Below that we have the project priority and this is used when different projects might be competing for the resources that are available and a projects priority will determine what priority it gets in claiming and using those resources. You can also define custom fields for a project in Project So having updated the Project Information, we can now turn our attention back to entering the rest of those tasks for this project. Project Video: Project Options, Entry Bar, Timeline, Properties Toby: In the previous section we looked at Project Information and the importance of that in terms of initially setting up a project like this one.

So the section we need is this one, Scheduling options for this project. Note that there is a drop down at the top there, House build If I click on the drop down, I get a choice between the options for all new projects or the options for this specific project.

Earlier on we setup new tasks are created auto scheduled. The second item here is Auto scheduled tasks are scheduled on. And the task is scheduled to begin on the project start date. Now there are actually two options here. Project start date is one, the other one is current date. Now alongside that the duration will be entered in and you can choose units for duration.

You can choose minutes, hours, days, weeks, months. For this building type project days is a pretty good option because you mostly manage those things in number of days.

But obviously if you were dealing with a very short term project, a very short term task, you might want to go for minutes or hours. Maybe a much bigger more strategic type of project you may want task to be in weeks or months.

Project we talk about work a little bit later on in the course. But there are a couple of other options here that we need to look at now. The pair of options we need to look at is this little pair on the right here. Show that scheduled tasks have estimated durations and new scheduled tasks have estimated durations. So click on OK and away we go.

So the next task is that one, just click away. Lay foundations. At the right hand end of the status bar, if I click on the minus, it zooms out. Watch what happens when I click on the minus. I zoom out of the time frame.

And note that the new task, the Lay foundation task, has actually been added with its start date today because I set the option of new tasks get a start date of current date. Now when it suspects that there could be a linkage between these two tasks, it gives me a choice.

Project Lay foundation without adding a link. There is a gap but it actually corresponds to the weekend. So let me put in the next task. If you go back into Backstage View, down into the options and on the Display page, one of the options right at the bottom there is Entry Bar, check Entry Bar, click on OK, and you get an entry bar.

And instead of typing into the task name or in fact any other cell in this table, you can type in the entry bar instead. Click in the next cell and again you note that the one day question mark is selected. I can just click in the entry bar and change that, say, to 12 days, click on tick. Some people prefer to use the entry bar than typing directly into the table here.

Just to show you again, you can do a file Save As. So in this case it says the start date is March 4th, the finish date is now April 12th.

But I also have Advanced Properties. Now with the Advanced Properties, I can set some properties that are really more related to the file than they are to the actual workings of Microsoft Project. So apart from showing me this file name, I can put in a subject, the author, and I suggest that as you work on your projects you put your own author name in there.

Bear in mind that if you setup your Project Options with your author name anyway, it will appear in there by default. You can use the Save button on the Quick Access Toolbar. Could I not fit the roof as soon as I had the walls built? That would make sense. They both need the walls but neither needs the other. So we quite often find that when it comes to putting things in sequence, when we look at these dependencies, they maybe not as straightforward as they might at first appear to be.

But if I want to force Project to insist that Lay foundation cannot happen until Prepare site has happened, I can establish a link between the two tasks. Now you could do this in a number of ways but the simplest way is this: Select the first task which means the row is highlighted in the table, hold the Control key down, select the second task, and then on the Task tab on the Ribbon in the Schedule Group, there is a pair of chain links and one of them is Link the selected tasks and one of them is Unlink the tasks.

Project and what happens is a link is added between the two. So now we can see the dynamic nature of Project as we add or change dependencies between the tasks. The walls have to all be completely built before we can fit the roof. Click on Link again and fitting the roof goes out to there. Now this task, Fit windows and doors, offers a couple more really interesting questions in terms of dependencies. First of all, do we have to have finished fitting the windows and doors before we fit the roof?

The answer to that is no. Must the walls be completely built before you fit the windows and doors? Do you have to have laid the foundations before you fit the windows and doors? I think yes you reasonably do.

And you would certainly have had to start building the walls. Project conclusion in something like this that the dependency is a little bit more complicated.

Something along the lines of well I will have had to do some building of the walls before I can fit windows and doors. A simple link there and now we can see that I will in effect be fitting the windows and doors and fitting the roof at the same time. And the whole build will be finished what around about the end of April by the look of it. So the dependency here is from Lay foundation to Build walls. There are four types of dependency. This is a finish to start which means that Lay foundation must finish before Build walls starts.

We normally use a letter abbreviation here. So finish to start is FS. Let me just cancel that and let me now click on Fit windows and doors. Let me double click and bring up that Task Information dialog again. In the Task Information dialog, you have one tab Predecessors and this tells you what the predecessor tasks are. Now the predecessor task there is only one for Fit windows and doors is Build walls.

I mentioned the ID numbers earlier on. This is how you uniquely identify a task in Project So the only predecessor currently of Fit windows and doors is Build walls ID 3. The type of dependency is FS with a zero day lag, and that in its very basic form is how to setup a dependency between tasks. These tasks can be in any sequence. So if I had chosen Build walls first and Lay foundation second and created a link Lay foundation would have followed Build walls.

We need to look at those in quite a bit more detail later on. If you want to look at the resources, there are a number of views specifically related to resources. Now if I click on the button below Gantt Chart there on the Task tab on the left, click on that, I get a list of available views, and one of the available views is Resource Sheet. So to switch back to Gantt Chart, I can just click on that and the one three to the right of that is the Resource Sheet View.

So if I click on that, that switches me back to Resource Sheet. Now let me set up some resources and one way of setting up resources is to set them up in the Resource Sheet. Now a brick layer is a person who lays bricks. Project know specifically which one yet.

And there are some situations where I may assign an individual straightaway, but more of that later. The next thing we need to do is to click into the next field which is type and select a type. Now in many ways this choice is the most important one of all. But a couple of these fields are important.

So when we come to schedule the building of the house, having only one brick layer may well turn out to be a very important thing. In Project , there are basically three types of resource and I want to look at each of those types now. The three types of resource are work, material, and cost. Project our house. So it will be people like the brick layers, the laborers, the plasterers, the painters, and so on.

Materials are the resources that get consumed in the building of the house. So this will be things like bricks, window frames, concrete, cement, mortar, and so on. Cost, typically is other costs. So we might have a pool or what in the U. Now the way that these three different types are used within Microsoft Project are actually quite different and particularly when we get to the area of working out costs, the way that the three of them work is very different.

Our brick layer as a person is a type of work resource. And if you look over to those cost fields that I mentioned just now, you can see that we have a standard rate, so a certain number of dollars per hour that we pay a brick layer. And then we have an overtime rate, a certain number of dollars per hour that we pay on overtime, extra time rate.

We also have another cost figure which is cost per use which is usually an additional cost we may have to pay one off to use this resource. So you may have to hire a piece of digging equipment.

For example, a cost for the supplier of the digger equipment to deliver to your site and collect it again at the end which is a one off additional cost. This is a material resource. Watch what happens when I select material to the other fields that have been filled in there on the resource sheet.

You notice that what the default values are changed. The standard rate is no longer per hour. The standard rate is the cost. There is a cost per use. Project particularly helpful field name because what that field actually represents is the units of measure of the material.

So my unit of measure is going to be that, thousands. I could put the word Thousands. In fact, you can put anything you like in that field as long as it makes clear what the units of measure are. So in a typical house, I might use say around 10, to 15, bricks which means that this particular material, bricks, if I wanted 12, bricks I would say 12 of this resource because this resource is 1, bricks. But let me just point out a couple of other things. If I say select the bricks line and double click, I come up with a Resource Information dialog, a bit like the Task Information dialog but this has got basically all of the information you need about a specific resource.

So if over a particular period of time the cost of something is going to go up or down or increase by a percentage, you can cover that within the resource information here.

So when it comes to things like costing, Microsoft Project is pretty powerful in terms of what you can do. And what I want you to do is to add some additional resources using the resource sheet. Now the terminology you use may be different. Depending on your locale you may call a person that deals with wood in a building a joiner or a carpenter, depending on where you are.

And you may use an abbreviation like a Chipee for a joiner. Again, a door single unit. And I left you with an exercise where I asked you to add a carpenter as a work resource and door and window as material resources. Now I appreciate that term carpenter normally implies a much more skilled resource than somebody who fits windows and doors. And in the U.

But I believe that term is no longer in use in the U. For instance, if I click on the plus sign here where it says Resource list options there are facilities there, for example, to filter. If I have a long list of resources and I want to find a suitable resource by filtering I can use the filter facilities.

I can also look at finding out which resources are actually available for a task rather than being used elsewhere. For the moment, all I want to do is to allocate the brick layer to the task of building walls. That means one brick layer. And depending on the cost figures, the cost of using the brick layer on that task is indicated here.

But if I had put a rate per hour and possibly even an additional cost per use, then the total cost of using the brick layer on building those walls would be shown here.

Project I could go through now and assign more resources to more tasks. You can customize and format a Gantt Chart but basically by default you would normally see the names of the resources that are used in a particular task listed next to the Gantt Chart bar.

Now if I use the little rollers here, I can go up in multiples. But it does say in the units column there 12 and then my units, thousands. Now you may be wondering what this RD column here is. And in situations, particularly where resources are shared between different projects and possibly different project managers, you can demand specific resources or you can request resources. Project Assignments Group, is Assign Resources. And if I click on Assign Resources, I get that same dialog again.

In Project in general, you can get just about everything from the Ribbon and a selection of things from the contextual menu at any specific point. Note that while this particular dialog is open, you can still select tasks in the Gantt Chart. And if you click on that, it takes you to the Open page in Backstage View.

Now you then have a list of potential locations for a project that you want to open. At the top of the list, you have the recent projects list. You can open a project from your SkyDrive.

But think of it as what many people nowadays refer to as Cloud based storage. One of those is going to be the one with the example files that come with this course.

So if I click on that, it takes me through to that list of example files. Project device. And there are various other possibilities such as Excel workbooks because I can import content for a Microsoft Project file from a workbook, an Excel binary workbook, an Excel earlier version workbook, and so on.

There are a number of possibilities there, and one of the other options I have is to specify all files. One of the options you have is to use the switching facility within Windows. Hold the Alt key down and press the Tab key repeatedly and that will let you step through all of the available open windows and each of the projects you have open will have a window that you can switch to using this approach.

Click on the drop down and it lists the open projects. So you can have more than one project open at once. If you click on Backstage View, File, one of the options there is Close and that will close the specific project that you have selected in view at the moment.

Project projects you have open at that time. So in this case that will close Project 4. So if I click on that Close button, Project 4 is closed. In fact, Project is still running but I now have no projects open so it waits for me to either open an existing project or create a new one. Now let me just go back to that Open page again and again look at this list of recent projects.

If you click on the push pin, it pins it to the list which means it stays fixed there until you unpin it. If you click on the picture of the pin again, it will be unpinned.

Now exactly the same principle applies on the start screen where you have the list of recent projects on the left. There is a button normally enabled on the Quick Access Toolbar, a picture of an old style diskette which is by default the standard image for Save.

But there are various other save types as well and I want to take a quick look at those now. But if I click on the drop down on Save As Type, I can see the list of other options that are available to me. Now first of all, we have a group of options that relate to earlier versions of Microsoft Project. The file extension MPP has been common throughout but the format has actually changed over many versions. Before that there was a format and then before that there was a format that was used in , , and versions of Microsoft Project.

Before that there was a format that was used with the Project 98 version. But using Project , you cannot save a Project file in the Project 98 format, although you can read those older formats. Why might you want one of these old formats? Project on the files. You can save a Microsoft Project as a template. And then you can also save it as an Excel workbook and this is effectively exporting it into Excel so that you can do other work on the tasks in Microsoft Excel.

So select PDF and click on Save. I get a dialog box. I can choose what range of dates I want to save. And then I can choose whether to include nonprinting information, document properties, document showing markup, and then the PDF options a bit of a technical option. So that is saving a project as a PDF file. Now we come to something very important in relation to save and that is to look at the Project Options relating to save.

And the first option on that page is to select the default save format. It would reduce the chance of you accidentally saving in the current format. You can also choose a default file location. Project when you start using Project , this defaults to your User Documents Folder within Windows but you can save it to do a different one. The next important option is AutoSave. Now I mentioned earlier in this section that you should save your work regularly. Well, I would go one step farther and I should say that you should have AutoSave set on to save your work regularly for you.

Some of them for example are pretty straightforward. This one Save to computer by default, check that, and then by default it will save to Computer rather than trying SkyDrive or somewhere else.

Use all of the default settings, include all of the dates. Now the first thing to note is that when you look at the top section on this page, Calendar Options for this project, once again you have a drop down. You have a drop down that lets you choose this particular project or all new projects. Now you may well have a standard calendar that you use on all your projects but you may have a particular one that gets a different calendar to everything else. So what do I mean by a calendar for a project?

And at that time people can do work on this project. Individual people may have different calendars. They may have different availability. But every project as a background needs a project calendar which is the basic time that work is done or is possible to be done on that project. So first of all, I have a couple of straightforward options here. One of them is on what day of the week does the week start? And the fiscal year start defaults to January.

You can change that to one of the other months of the year for your fiscal annual reporting. We then have a default start time and a default end time for tasks. Now again this is not the same as the start time and end time as will appear on the calendar. As it says in the note here, these times are assigned to tasks when you enter a start or finish date without specifying a time. If you change this setting consider matching the project calendar using the Change working time command. How many working hours per day, how many hours per week, this is based on a five day working week, and how many days per month.

Clearly, in reality the number of working days per month varies depending on which month it is, and then allowing for things like Christmas, public vacations, Easter and that sort of thing. And if they get out of step, you can give yourself really quite a few problems. Project a view of the current standard project calendar.

Now the standard project calendar is the default that comes with Project If your default, your standard calendar for your projects does not agree with this, then you can change the standard. Maybe this is the one that I use for all of my building projects. I can create a new base calendar from scratch so that means I specify everything or I can just make a copy of the standard calendar.

Default, if I double click on Default it brings up a little dialog, Details for default, and this lets me define my standard working week; my default working week. So if I want to setup the working hours for my default working week what I can do is to go through the days of the week, Sunday through Saturday, and for each day of the week I can specify the working hours. If I step through the days now you can see what they are by default. So Monday, for example, you can see grayed out there 8 to 12, 1 to 5 and then the same for the other working days of the week and Saturday is a nonworking day.

So by default that means Sunday and Saturday have been nonworking days, the others will be working days. Or I can specifically say Set the selected day or days to nonworking time or I can say Set the selected day or days to these specific working times.

Project those days by holding down Monday, the Shift key, and then Friday, so all five days are selected, I can click on Set days to these specific working times. Those areas are now editable and I can enter my new working times for the five working days of the week. So let me just click in the first one which currently says 8 a. Click in the next one which currently says 12 p.

And you can actually see on the right here that on a standard working day like today, March 29th, my working hours are now 9 till 1 and 2 till 6. Calendar options for just this project. Hours per day is the same, hours per week is the same, days per month no change there, click on OK. Let me just use the arrows to the right of the calendar here to go down to the month of April.

Now this is a nonworking day. By default, it becomes a nonworking day. If this were a repeating event then I could set this up as a recurrence. It starts on Monday, April 1st and it ends after that one occurrence. Whereas on the other hand, if I went down to the month of December, December 25th is always a public holiday so let me select that, click here, Christmas, December 25th, go into the details, nonworking. This is a recurrence pattern.

In the previous section we created a new calendar called building calendar and it had different hours of work from the ones that come by default with Project in the standard calendar.

We also still need to add the rest of the public holidays to that calendar. Now basically the majority of people working on this project will be working to the same hours as the project itself. Now I want to change that to be the building calendar. Project So for the brick layer the default working week is the one on the calendar building calendar.

So click on OK. That will have now corrected the working time for brick layer and then if I do the same for the carpenter who is my other work resource, again click on Change working time and his calendar is based on the building calendar as well. Now again I should point out here that although the resource calendar for carpenter has as its base calendar, the building calendar if I wanted to put some exceptions for the carpenter, I could do them here.

If the carpenter is going to take a couple of weeks off, I can actually record that as an exception here. If the carpenter, for instance, has to go to the dentist one day, I can actually put a two or three hour exception in here. So you can define exceptions for individual resources. And from now on any work resources that I add will have their calendars based on the new building calendar and not on the original calendar.

And what I now need to do is to add the rest of the public holidays for this year. Now if you are actually following this course in a subsequent year beyond , then I hope you can adapt this accordingly. But the next thing for you to do is to add the rest of those public holidays. You could schedule it even farther if you want to but schedule it to at least Now I appreciate that depending on your locale your public holidays may be different.

If you want to follow the U. This currently separates the table on the left. So I just do that now. In the group at the left hand end of the Ribbon, we have Task Views and this is really a straightforward way of accessing all of the available task views. Some of those task views have specific buttons.

So for instance, the command button in the top right hand corner of the group if I hover over it that gives us access to the network diagram. Below that the calendar and below that a task form. I want to concentrate now though on not Gantt Chart but Task Usage. Now with task usage we have a list of the tasks. And in the Task Usage View you can see that we have a list of the resources that are used in each task.

So if we look at the build walls task, we can see the resources are brick layer and bricks. Project Now the brick layer we are using 80 hours of and the bricks we are using 12 thousands of. But what we can see in the Task Usage View is when we are using them. This can be useful for many reasons, not least of which we know when we need the brick layer to be available for example and we need to know when we need the bricks for.

If I scroll a little bit earlier in time, still no sign of using those resources. So this is a really useful breakdown of what we need and when we need it, but as you can see the current view is not really ideal because it was quite difficult to track what we wanted in this Task Usage View.

So we give ourselves a little bit more space on the right. But in the case of a building project which is going to go on for many weeks getting a broad view using a day by day display is maybe not the best option.

There are a couple of ways of getting round this. With the Zoom dialog you are given options of how much to show in view. Now what you can show in view, you can have one week, two weeks, one month, three months, the duration of a selected task. So I could actually choose a view which would setup on the right hand side there the timescale to cover just the duration of a selected task.

Project either because with this view, all I find is that in one period of time I need 9. It all seems a little bit strange. What Project does when you select entire project is it sets up the timescale literally to show the entire project. If you right click where the timescale is there, so somewhere around those dates or the days of the week markers there you will see timescale, dot, dot, dot.

Click on Timescale, dot, dot, dot on the contextual menu and you get the Timescale dialog. Now the Timescale dialog has a number of tabs, including three tabs for the possible three tiers of the time table: top tier, middle tier, bottom tier. And literally they are top tier, middle tier, bottom tier.

At the moment, you can only see two tiers. And if you look at Timescale Options within the dialog, you can see that it says Show two tiers, only middle and bottom are in use. The middle tier currently says Middle tier formatting, units weeks, count four.

And four weeks after April 14th is May 12th, so that explains those rather strange dates up there. The labeling of the time period is dictated by this field, Label, and you have a choice of ways of labeling dates.

So in this case that label, so for instance March 17, is aligned in the left of the time period that it covers. So, click on bottom tier and the bottom tier is arranged in multiples of 11 days.

Now that really is a rather strange interval to use but it is a result of deciding to show the whole project duration in view.

And then let me just go back into the timescale once more. You can actually type a value in there. And you can usually get a timescale format set that enables you to see just what you want to see in any given situation. The approach in Gantt Chart View is exactly the same. If I click back now and go back into the Gantt Chart, then I could customize the Gantt Chart timescale in exactly the same way and to achieve exactly what affect that I want at any given time.

In the previous section we looked at views, in particular we looked at a couple of Task Views and at how to format the time scale in any view that includes a time scale to make it suit the purposes of the view that you are using.

And as you saw before, if we double click on one of these, we bring up the Resource Information dialog. So for instance, the brick layer works on the build walls task, the bricks are used in the build walls task and so on.

Now as before, we can customize the time scale on the right in order to see what our resource requirements are. But as I say basically this is Task Usage View turned inside out if you like. Now I should point out that pretty much on any of these drop downs, for instance here on the resource usage drop down here, if I click on that drop down, I almost always see More Views at the bottom.

Click on More Views and you have a list of pretty much all of the available views and there are quite a few of them. Also either starting from the drop down or from this More Views dialog, you can make a copy of a particular view. You could, for instance, make a copy of Gantt Chart View and then you could customize it to your specific requirements.

Project particular view and that you like a particular set of settings where you have a combination of what you can see, the time scale, and so on, then you can setup a custom view with a name of your choice. Now the view that can be very helpful in that situation is Resource Graph View. What it has is a sequence of little panels and each panel corresponds to one of our resources. At the moment, the first resource shown is brick layer and there is a graph showing the use of our one brick layer.

And in fact in the Zoom Group on the View tab, the second button down on the right there is a straightforward zoom entire project button. Now, of course, you may get those strange time periods that we saw earlier on. You can use that to switch on and switch off the timeline. You can see the words Task Form on the left hand edge there just written on its side. And I can also, using the bottom part of this Split View display, step through the tasks using the Next and Previous buttons in the bottom part.

So instead of clicking on Build walls in the top half of the Split View, if I were to click on Next in the bottom part, it would take me to Build walls anyway. And in Build Walls I can see start, finish, the resource usage, and the predecessors. So I can also see which other task it depends on, in this case, Lay foundation.

And I can see what the dependency type it. So I can step through my project using either next and previous in the lower part of the Split View or I can select a task in the top part of the Split View. Now if I choose resource form, it shows me resource information. But it shows me resource information related to the resources that are used on the selected task in the Gantt Chart. Now Fit windows and doors uses three resources.

It uses carpenter, it uses doors, and it uses windows. If you look at the lower part of the Split View where I have resource form selected what the next and previous buttons do here is not to take me through the tasks in the Gantt Chart but to take me through the resources that are used by the selected task in the Gantt Chart.

So the first resource is carpenter, click on Next, and I get to the resource door and the next one is the resource window. And for each of those resources I can see which tasks the resource is used in. So I might even find out what other project my resources are used in. You can just uncheck the details box there. You can also grab the center dividing line in much the same way that we grabbed the vertical divider and you can just drag it off the bottom of the display and it goes and the details box in the Split View Group is unchecked as well.

So that should get you started on views. I just want to show you a couple of other things. And what that does is to adjust the timescale to suit just the selected task. So if I click on that, it basically expands the timescale or contracts or compresses the timescale so that you can see those two tasks. That can be pretty useful.

Project And another view altogether is Calendar View. If you go to the Task Views over here again, that group. The middle one on the right there is Calendar View. If you click on Calendar View, what you see is the various tasks involved in the project plotted on a Calendar View.

Now the first thing I need to explain is that in Project there are basically two types of entity. And the two types of entity are tasks and resources. We can use some information about it here. It has a duration; 10 days. It has a start of Monday, March 4th, a finish of Friday, March 15th, and it has no predecessor, so the predecessors field is empty.

So we have here four or five pieces of information about the task Prepare site. Project actually stores dozens of pieces of information about Prepare site. At the moment, many of them will be blank but they could also be used and in a long complicated project, we may have literally dozens of pieces of useful information about a task. So now let me look at Resource Sheet View again. In Resource Sheet View, I get a table of resource information.

Project information about resources and those two things are really the foundation on which Microsoft Project works. There are other entities. For instance, there is the relationship between a task and a resource which is what we call a resource assignment. So we may have information about how a particular resource is used on a particular task. We also have relationships between tasks and tasks.

So for instance, we can say that one task is a predecessor or successor of another. So let me just switch back to Gantt Chart View again and once again look at this table. Now in this view what I want to do is to look at the View tab again, but I want to click on the drop down here on the Tables button in the Data Group and it lists a number of built in tables.

I could choose a different table. I could show the cost table. Watch what happens if do that. What I get is a different selection of fields that are shown for each of the tasks in my project. So I have a fixed cost, I have a fixed cost accrual rule, and then I have things like total cost, baseline cost, variance, actual, remaining.

Again, go back to that tables drop down again. I could actually look at the work table and the work table shows me a different selection of fields. Now in the case of the work table against build walls, for example, 80 hours is the total amount of work, and one of the other fields is the remaining amount of work which is 80 hours. Project and so on. You may also choose to export information from a table, for example into Microsoft Excel to do some external processing, a bit of number crunching somewhere else.

But you can actually insert a new column anywhere you like in the display table. Now what happens then is I can type a column name if I want to, one of my choosing, or I can just select the field that I want. By default the header that we get there is Work, but I could rename that column if I wanted to. But the first thing to note is that my work figures have now appeared and you can see the 80 hours, 96 hours, and so on.

I can also click the Best Fit button which will make sure that this column has its width adjusted to best fit the contained data. Now, a couple of things to notice about that, one of them is if I go back to that tables drop down in the Data Group on the View tab again right near the bottom there is second up from the bottom, Save fields as a new table. Project updates on your projects. If you click on this option you can save this new table as a new table, give it a name, and it will be available to you from that point onwards by its new name.

If you bring up that option, then as with views you have an option of making a copy of a table, say, the entry table, giving it a name, editing that, putting it into the table organizer. And you note also here with the tables that the tables in this More Tables dialog are in two groups, the task tables and the resource tables.

There are more task tables than resource table, but there are a lot of resource fields and quite a few resource tables as well. So you can customize pretty much all of the tables. You can save any customizations that you want to keep. You can reset, etc. You can not only insert a column, you can hide a particular column. So if I wanted to save a bit of space here, if I select the predecessors column, right click, one of the options is Hide column.

Field settings takes us back into that same dialog again that includes things like a Best Fit button. Project within that table as well. And everything on the resource sheet with the tables appropriate to resources works in just the same way.

So, Timeline View. Now the first thing to note is that Timeline View can be shown with virtually any of the standard views in Project What happens is the timeline appears up here.

Now at the moment the timeline as such is empty but there is some information. There is a start date for the project which is Monday, March 4th. There is a finish date of the project which is Wednesday, May the 15th. And then there are three other dates marked along the timeline for the whole project and today is marked with a vertical line and a little today marker. Now the principle behind Timeline View is that you choose what you want to show in Timeline View.

Now with the rather restricted project we have at the moment, we might choose from these five tasks. If I right click on the Build walls task, one of the options is right near the bottom there, Add to timeline. And once I do that, what happens is that the Build walls task is shown as a block in Timeline View. So I can actually see how Build walls features in the overall timeline of the project. Now as I mentioned just now typically you would use Timeline View for what are called summary tasks.

So you would take the large subdivisions of a project and show those in Timeline View to give you a good summary view of the breakdown of the overall time scale of a project. By using Timeline View, you can really get a good summary view. Supposing I wanted to show Fitting the roof as well. If I tap on the Fit roof task to select it, tap and hold, up comes my Mini Toolbar, tap on the drop down at the right, and one of the options there is Add to timeline and now I can see Fitting the roof on the Timeline View as well.

Now when you have the timeline selected you will see the Timeline Tools Format tab and that has a number of very useful tools on it, some of which are closely associated with one of the main purposes for which the timeline is used and that is to give you a way of putting a summary of a schedule into another document.

One of the things I can do if I say select Prepare site is there is an option for the current selection of displaying it as a call out. So if I do display as callout, what happens is that particular task moves outside the timeline and in effect becomes sort of highlighted and the period of time it covers is now shown as an interval on the timeline.

And if I want to move that back inside the timeline bar again, I can just click on display as bar. With the tasks that are in the timeline, I can do various types of formatting to them. For instance, if I selected that task I could change the font, font size, color of the font text. I could even change the fill color. So let me change that to a sort of reddish color. Now in this way you can pretty much make the timeline look any way that you want, highlight particular points.

And having made the timeline look just the way that you want it to, what you can then do is to copy it ready to paste into another document. If you click on the bottom of that, you have three options: Copy timeline for email, for a presentation, or full size. Project Now, a couple of things to note about the timeline before we move on.

Let me add another task. Let me add the task Fit windows and doors to the timeline. Notice how they finish up stacked.