Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.
In this section we’re going to take a look at Project Options.
And to a large extent Project Options represent your own personalization of your installation
of Project and in the way that you use Project on your projects.
Some of these options you need to have set correctly before you start to create and work
on any kind of substantial project.
And in fact as we’re going to get started on our exercise project in the next section
very important that you go through this one carefully.
Even if you’ve used Microsoft Project before I suggest that you follow this section through
because I’m going to make sure that we cover all of the essential options so that when
you start working on the exercise you won’t finish up having to sort of go back and redo
things later on.
So to access Project Options the normal way is to go into Backstage View and right at
the bottom you have Options and that brings up the Project Options dialogue.
You’ve seen this already because there are various points where you get taken to this
dialogue, often to a specific page on this dialogue and you are given the opportunity
there to change something or set something.
So you may well recall when we were looking at Quick Access Toolbar, for example, we went
to this Quick Access Toolbar page and used the controls on this page to add a button
to the Quick Access Toolbar, that Bold button.
In fact I think I’ll remove that Bold button now.
And we also removed a couple of other buttons that we didn’t need.
Now what we’re going to do in this section is go systematically through these pages and
look at the options that we need to get set straightaway.
Now in order to demonstrate the way that many of the options work I’m going to do a quick
demo in relation to what’s called Screen Tip Style.
The very top entry on the first page, the General page of options, User Interface Options,
Screen Tip Style, Show Feature Descriptions in Screen Tips.
If I click on the dropdown here there are three options: Show feature descriptions in
Screen Tips, Don’t show feature descriptions in Screen Tips, Don’t show Screen Tips.
Now at the moment with that first option selected, let’s go back to that.
Just click on OK.
If I hover over one of the buttons on the Ribbon I get a Screen Tip, Move Task, Move
the selected task forward.
You can also move the task to when the resources are available, etcetera.
Now let me go back into the Options and let me change that to Don’t show feature descriptions,
click on OK.
OK generally saves any changes that I’ve made.
Let me hover over Move again.
And now all I get is Move Task.
So that’s the name of the command but not a description of what it does.
If I go back into Options again, obviously if I chose the third option, Don’t show
Screen Tips, I wouldn’t even see the Screen Tip with the name of that particular command.
So let me put that back at its previous setting, the original setting, and that’s really
the principle on which many of these options work.
Now let’s look at some of the other key ones on this General page.
The default view for me is Gantt with Timeline.
I pointed that out to you a couple of times.
That’s the default view when I open up Project, particularly start working on a new project
that’s what I see.
And I also can choose here my default Date Format which is the short form of the day
of the week with and then month, day, year.
Various other Date Formats to choose from Choose the one that you prefer.
My User Name is here with my initials.
Now you may think well what difference does that make?
If you’re collaborating with other people on projects, if you’re sharing projects
and so on you may do things like Comment on projects.
You may make certain other changes to projects which are identified as being by you.
And having your user name and initials set correctly here enables other people to track
that it was you that made that change or made that comment.
Now if you remember right back near the beginning of the course I talked about the fact that
one of the new features in Project 2016 was the availability of some alternative Office
Themes.
And this is where you can choose the Office Theme.
Now I’ve currently got Colorful.
If I selected Dark Gray, clicked on OK.
It’ll basically change my Office Theme to that Dark Gray Office Theme.
I think that’s probably quite difficult for you to see the video so I’m just going
to go back in and change it back to the way that it was.
But again you might want to experiment with that to see which of those Themes you prefer.
And something else that I mentioned earlier on in the course is that you can suppress
the showing of the Start Screen.
And you do that by unchecking this box.
If I uncheck that, click on OK to save the change.
Next time I start Project I won’t see the Start Screen.
Again, that’s something for you to try out to see if you are happier with that arrangement.
Whatever changes are made, as always, I click on OK to save them.
And just incidentally while I talked about that particular change, most changes that
you make in Project Options are activated when you click OK to close the Project Options
dialogue.
There are a small number of changes where you do need to restart Project for them to
take effect.
But when it is necessary to restart Project it does actually tell you that you need to
restart Project for the change to take effect.
The next page I want to look at is the Display page and there are two important options here
at this stage.
First of all for each project that you work on you can set the currency options.
At the moment we only have Project 1 here and the dropdown here lets me choose from
the available projects.
So there’s only Project 1.
And I can set a symbol, the decimal digits, the currency, and so on here.
And the second option on this page, again going back to something that I mentioned earlier
on, if don’t see the Entry Bar it’s probably because this option down here for Entry Bar
is unchecked.
Make sure that’s checked and you’ll see the Entry Bar between the Ribbon and the Timeline.
Now the next page is the Schedule page and there are a couple of very important settings
here which I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to set based on trusting what I’m
telling you at the moment.
I’m going to explain these settings to you a little bit later on in the course.
But at the outset I’d like you to have them set in a particular way.
Now there are some very straightforward settings on this page.
So for instance, the week starts on a Sunday, the fiscal year starts on January.
You may be tempted to do things like change the default start time and end time for working
days where you work, hours per day, hours per week, etcetera.
By all means set those if you want to.
I will be talking about those and calendars in general in a bit of detail later on.
At this stage it’s not really that important that you get them quite right just at the
moment.
Two settings I do want you to set in a particular way though are these, first of all.
New task created manually scheduled.
I’ve mentioned that before.
I’ve currently got New task created manually scheduled.
I want you to set that to auto-scheduled.
And it’s very likely that for most of you this will be the way to leave this settings
set in the longer term.
And what this basically means is that when you create a task in a project it becomes
auto-schedule which means that as you schedule the project or in many cases as Project 2016
schedules the project this one is automatically scheduled according to all of the constraints,
dependencies, resource availability, all the other factors that come into force this task
will be scheduled accordingly.
If you leave this set at manually scheduled for new tasks then each task that created
is manually scheduled and each task that you create either has to individually be changed
to auto-schedule or you have to manually schedule each task.
There may be situations in which manually schedule is what you want and I’ll talk
about that later on.
But for the moment I want you to make sure that’s set at auto-schedule.
The other setting that I want you to make sure is set in a particular way is down here
where it says Calculation.
Calculate project after each edit on or off.
Now I’d like you to make sure that is set to On, which means that each time we make
a change to the schedule Project 2016 will automatically calculate the effects of that
change without you having to take a separate calculation stop.
Now I’ll explain more of the significance of that setting later on in the course as
well.
But basically for the moment just bear in mind that Project 2016 has to do a lot, particularly
in a large project, to work out how to schedule things and each time you make a change you
really need to see the affects that change has had potentially on whole parts of the
project.
And if you don’t have that set to On you have to separately and as a manual exercise
tell Project 2016 to calculate the project, i.e., to reschedule it.
So for the moment I’d like you to set that to On as well.
And as I say with both of those settings I’ll explain more later on.
The next page is the Proofing page and that relates to Spellchecking and Auto-Correction
as you’re typing.
I’m not going to go through this at this stage.
But if you’ve used the Proofing facilities in other components of Microsoft Office such
as Microsoft Word I’m sure you’ll be able to go through there and make the appropriate
settings for you.
Now we come to the Save page and there are a couple of very important settings here.
One of them is the default file location.
And this is the location where any Project files that you save will be saved to by default.
It’s set when you install Project 2016 to one of the folders within in your personal
Windows directory.
You may want to leave it set there or you may want to save your Project files by default
somewhere else, entirely your decision.
Mine is currently set to save in the default location.
The next option is the AutoSave option.
And if you’ve used other components of Microsoft Office you might be tempted to switch AutoSave
on.
And that will cause Project 2016 to save your work at regular intervals according to the
number of minutes selected in this box.
Now you may well be tempted to switch that on but I don’t and there is a good reason
for that.
Unlike other components of Microsoft Office you have AutoSave switched on each time AutoSave
occurs it clears your Undo history.
So once an AutoSave happens you cannot then Undo.
Now for some people they’re quite happy to work on that principle.
Perhaps they don’t use Undo very much or perhaps they’re very careful.
You can in fact use this option for a prompt to warn you when an AutoSave is about to happen.
But in my case I prefer to leave AutoSave switched off.
But ultimately it’s your choice.
The next page also has very important settings.
And this page determines the language that you’re using to work in Microsoft Project.
Now you can have more than one language installed and you can select different ones for different
situations.
I have English (United States) and English (United Kingdom) as the two languages that
I use.
They are sufficiently different to warrant being described as two different languages.
My default is set at English (United States).
If you need to add an additional language it’s very straightforward.
There’s a dropdown here which gives you access to many, many, many more languages.
And in a particular case with a particular project most people find that their default
language is the one they use most of the time.
But if you do work in more than one language, even if the two languages are two versions
of English, you do need to be aware of this language setting.
And when you’re working on a project make sure that you have the appropriate language
selected.
Now let me quickly run through the remaining pages of Project Options.
There are no settings on the Advanced page that you need to worry about now.
We will be looking at one or two settings from here later on.
Customize Ribbon is the equivalent of the customization page for the Quick Access Toolbar
and it looks quite similar.
The main difference is that rather than say selecting commands from the list on the left
and adding them to what was the Quick Access Toolbar on the right what you would normally
do is create your own tab, add your own groups to it and then copy commands from the left
hand list to your groups on your new tab.
And then as in the example that I showed you earlier on with the two tabs on my Ribbon,
Reporting and Team, you could build up your own custom tabs on the Ribbon.
Now I’m not going to cover that now but by all means have a look at the help, give
it a try and see how you get on with it.
Don’t forget you can always click the Reset button to put things back how they were if
things go horribly wrong.
Quick Access Toolbar page you’ve already seen and you’ve seen me use it.
Add-Ins are out of scope for this course.
And the Trust Center is sort of out of scope for this course.
There’s one thing I would like to say about it.
In Project 2016 mainly the Trust Center is concerned with the fact that one way that
people can get malicious content onto your computer is to get you to run macros.
And macros can be included within Microsoft Project files.
Make sure that you have the setting here for macro settings at Disable all macros with
notification.
And then if you open a Project file from somebody else and it says, “I want to run a macro.”
I you know who the person is that you’ve got the Project file from and you absolutely
trust the source you can let the macro run, but if not you can say, “Nope, I’m not
going to let that macro run.”
So that’s it.
That’s the basics, the overview of Project Options.
And we’re going to be looking at quite a few others as we go along.
Please make sure that you’ve got set the ones that I said you should have set.
That’s it for this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.