Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. We’re now going to get started on putting
together a project and we’re going to use as our example the building of a house. Now,
you may not be very familiar with house building but don’t let that worry you too much because
even if you don’t live in a house you’ve probably seen houses and you must have some
idea of how they are built. For instance, you’d understand that you need to build
the floor before you build the walls and you’d need to build the walls before you put the
roof on. We’re going to start with a very, very simple model of how to build a house
and then we’re going to develop that throughout the course.
In this section and the next couple of short sections, I’m going to introduce you to
the most important basic features of Microsoft Project and then throughout the rest of the
course we’re going to add a lot of detail to all of those things. Now I must admit that
in the early stages this is going to seem like an incredibly simple house and in fact
it’s going to seem as though it’s a pretty cheap house to build. But as we develop our
project further on, you’ll realize that things aren’t quite as simple or quite as
inexpensive as they appear early on. The other thing to bear in mind is that as we’re working
away, particularly through these earlier sections, I’m going to show you one or two ways of
doing things and later on I’ll show the alternative ways or many of the alternative
ways. 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. But I don’t want to get too bogged down
in showing you all of the alternatives all of the time so I’m going to go for pretty
straightforward options to begin with. And the first straightforward option we’re going
to go for is I’m not going to be tempted to search for a template for building a house.
I’m going to start with a blank project. So, on the start screen, Project 2013, just
click on Blank project. Now I said I was going to use a very simple
model for building this house, so the first thing we’re going to do is to prepare the
site. Now when you’re entering the sequence of steps that have to be followed to do something,
the sequence of steps that constitute your project, you can actually put them into Microsoft
Project in any order you like. Even though I know that I’m not going to put the roof
on first, I could put Put roof on as my first task, and then I could sort out the 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. And the first task in this project is Prepare site
so I’m going to enter that task into the project first.
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. You can see it now highlighted
and just type in Prepare site as normal just using the keyboard and that’s my first task.
Now when I’ve finished entering the name of that task, all I really need to do is to
click in, say, the Task name cell below that one ready to put in the second task and then
a couple of things happen. 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. So let
me explain what’s going on there. Now as we’ll see later it’s possible to
tell Microsoft Project 2013 quite a bit about what you’re defaults are when you’re entering
a new project. 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. Now, I’m going to use for all of these tasks in the initial
version of this project a duration of 10 days. Now, that’s not correct and we’re going
to see how to change that later on, but we’re going to start with 10 days.
So I’m going to allow 10 days to prepare this site. 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 10-day duration.
Now before I click away to actually change that to 10 days note that on the right I’ve
already got a bit of Gantt Chart bar there that shows a one day duration. The M indicates
M for Monday, that’s today, Monday, March the 25th and when I change that to 10 days
watch what happens to that bar. I’m going to actually click back down where I clicked
before. Now watch what happens. That particular task now shows a duration of 10 days in the
Gantt Chart. Now the next thing I need to do is to correct
the fact that I’m actually a little bit late setting this project up and I should
have had it in place three weeks ago. So where as I’ve entered this first task, it’s
defaulted to today’s date for its start. That’s Monday, March 25th. It should be
three weeks ago. Now to change the start date, it’s pretty
straightforward and all I need to do is click into the start cell here where it currently
says Monday, March 25th. 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.
That’s going to happen a lot. All you need to do is to hover over that with the mouse
until it becomes that double vertical line with the little arrow sticking out of the
side, click with the mouse assuming you’re using the mouse, do it with your fingers if
you’re using touch, and I can just drag that line to the right just to make it a little
bit easier to read that date. 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. And generally speaking,
when you’re dealing with all of these types of view in Microsoft Project you’re going
to need to adjust the widths of columns and this separator between the two halves of the
view in this case in order to be able to see everything. Now, your display is probably
showing a different amount of a project to mine because it will depend on the resolution
of your screen, whether you’re widescreen, and so on. So if you can’t see what I can
see, if something is missing, if something is running off the screen, just get used to
adjusting the settings, the widths of the columns in the way that I’ve just done.
So now back to what we were just doing. Let’s go back into that start cell here. Click on
the cell and there’s a little drop down at the right of the cell and that takes us
into a date picker. 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. I said I’m three weeks
late with setting this project up so I’m going to change that 25 there back three weeks.
It should have been Monday, March 4th. Click on that, that’s changed my start date. Now,
note when I created this project Microsoft Project automatically assumes a start date
for the whole project. And in this case, it’s saying you moved task one of the project to
start Monday, March the 4th. 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 I’m going to click on OK continue because I want this
project to start on that date and in a little while we’ll look at how to change the project
start date. So having put in the first task, the project start date has been set and now
I’m going to need to change it later on, but we’ll come back to that a little bit
later on. We’ll just click on OK and Microsoft Project is happy again.
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 that there are
various other pieces of information that are automatically entered by Project as you’re
setting up the tasks in your project. One of them is task mode as you can see here.
We’ve talked about manually scheduled versus automatically scheduled before. 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. If I wanted to change
it to manually scheduled, that’s one of the places that I could do it.
Another very important point here is that when you enter a task it’s given an ID number.
This is ID number one. Now I’m going to talk about task IDs later on, but as we’ll
see task IDs are very important. And now the thing we have to do and I would
normally do this before I’d even put my first task into a project, we need to save
this project. We need to make sure we keep it safe. And on this course, I’m basically
going to be using two folders for projects. One of them I’ve shown you already. That’s
the one with the example files for this project and ultimately this project will go in there.
But I also have a sort of scratch folder, the one that I’m going to use just for intermediate
working on one or two special cases that I’ll be looking at. Now you can save your copy
of this project assuming you’re working along with me anyway you like, of course.
I suggest that you don’t overwrite the files that came with the course. So I suggest you
also have some sort of scratch folder, something you can use temporarily whilst you’re working
your way through the course. So, pretty simple to save a project. File. Click on Save As
and then you’ll have a number of options. Yours may not be quite the same as mine, but
one of them will be Computer and then you’ll need to browse to a folder where you’re
going to be able to save your scratch files, your working files. So I’m going to click
on Browse and then on my computer I’m going to double click on this folder and this folder
which is currently empty is the one that I’m going to keep my working files in. Now the
default file type a Microsoft Project file is MPP. There are some others that are relevant
and we’ll come back to those later. I’m going to call this particular project, I’m
going to call it House build and then I’m just going to call it House build 01. 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 01.mpp which is
the file name for this particular project. So that’s one task setup in this project.
Now before we move on to add some of the other tasks and look at some of the other aspects
of setting this project up, I want to just click on that row in the Gantt Chart again
so that it’s selected. 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. So we have a General tab, a Predecessors tab,
a Resources tab, an Advance tab, Notes. You can even setup Custom fields. But let’s
go back to the General tab and look at the General tab first. 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. Percent complete 0%. That means we haven’t actually
started it yet. We’ve then got a pair of radio buttons; Schedule mode, manually scheduled,
auto scheduled. A priority and then we can also see the start date and a finish date.
Now these and the other properties of a task we’ll be looking at in great detail later
on. But for the moment, for any task, if you bring up that Task Information dialog, it
will contain pretty much all the information you’re likely to need about that task.
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. That’s it for this section.
I'll see you in the next one.