Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.
In this section I’m going to look at opening and closing projects.
And before I do that the very first thing I need to do is to save the first version
of the wedding plan.
And I’m going to talk more about saving in a couple of sections time.
For the moment I’m going to save this to the course file folder with a very straightforward
file name and then we’re going to concentrate on a bit of opening and closing for now.
And I’ll tell you more about Save later.
So in order to save this project go to Backstage View, click on Save As.
Save As brings up a Save As page.
And exactly what you see here will depend on what Save As locations are available to
you.
I have SharePoint sites available to me.
I have a couple of OneDrive locations available to me.
And I have of course the PC that I’m working on.
Now depending on how your defaults are set you will by default be offered one of the
available options.
On this occasion I’m not going to accept my default of saving to a SharePoint task
list.
I’m going to save it to my PC.
And that’s what I want you to do as well whenever you save files.
Now when I click on this PC I’ll normally see a list of folders that are either default
folders or ones that I’ve used recently.
Now I don’t actually want to use any of those folders so I’m actually going to the
bottom here and I’m going to browse to the folder that I want.
Once I’ve used that folder, and that’s the course file folder in my case, that will
appear on this Save As list under this PC next time.
So I’m going to click on Browse and then browse to the course file folder.
Now at the moment the course file folder is empty as far as the Save As type that I’m
using is concerned.
And my default Save As type is set to MPP.
That should be your default Save As type as well.
So all I need to do now is to give my project file a name.
So the extension will be MPP and the name I’m going to give it is SSI Wedding 01.
Click on Save.
Now when I’ve saved that file the file name appears in the header of Microsoft Project
2016 at the top there to remind me of what the name is.
And if I would now to save this or any other project using the approach that I’ve just
taken.
So if I do again File, Save As and click on this PC that course files folder now appears
in the list of Save As locations.
Now there’s a couple of important things to note about these sort of lists of locations
and lists of files and so on.
And that is that as you work more and more with Project 2016 obviously these lists are
going to tend to get longer and things will start to drop off the bottom of the list.
Now there’s a little pin on the right here and if you click that you can pin items to
the list.
I anticipate that I’m going to be saving a lot of items to the course files folder.
I don’t want it to drop off the bottom of any list so I’m going to pin it to this
list to make sure that it stays there.
There’s now a new category here of Pinned.
So if you’re going to be working with a couple of folders, the course file folder
and the exercise file folder, you may well want to pin them to this and any other list
that you finish up using.
So having saved that project to that folder I’m now going to close it by clicking on
the Close button here and I now have Project 2016 open with no files open.
In a moment I’m going to look at some of the options for opening that wedding project
again.
But just before I do let’s go to Project Options, the Advanced page.
And I did mention earlier on that we would be looking at some of these advanced options
as we go through the course.
There won’t be time to go through every single thing but I will point out a few of
them as we go.
And I do suggest that from time to time you take a browse through these options.
For example, on the Advanced page in the Display section the first option, Show this number
of recent projects.
In that way you can control how many projects appear in the Recent list.
And below that one of the options is Show this number of unpinned recent folders.
So you have a number of options that you can experiment with and set to your own requirements
there.
I’m not going to change my setting at the moment.
But what I am going to do is to exit Project altogether and sort of pretend it’s the
next day and come back in and see what happens as I start up Project.
Well when I start up Project I can of course see the wedding project in my recent projects
list.
But I’m not going to open that at the moment.
What I’m going to do is to start a new blank project.
And whilst I’m working on my new blank project I decide that I need to look at the wedding
project.
Now I don’t need to close this project.
I can have more than one project open at once.
So I’m going to go to File, Open, and of course there in my Recent files list is the
wedding project.
I might choose to pin it to that list.
Remember what I pinned before was the folder not the individual project.
Now I’m not going to pin this on this occasion but I am going to select the wedding project,
open it now.
Obviously if I needed to use Browse or this PC or go to any other location that’s fine.
And that gives me many options for opening existing projects.
So I click on Wedding 01 and I’ve now got two projects open.
There’s absolutely no problem with having two or more projects open other than switching
between them and that’s what we’re going to look at next.
There are a number of ways of switching between open projects.
There are ways within Project and there are ways within Windows as well.
Now the ways within Windows of switching between open projects to some extent depend on whether
you’re using Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 or 10.
One way is to use the well-known Alt-Tab way of cycling through the running programs.
Another way, and this I’m going to demonstrate in Windows 10, is if I move the mouse over
the Project icon on the Task Bar I can see the two open projects.
And all I need to do is to click on the one I want to work on and I’ll switch into that
project and then obviously switch back just choose the other one.
Within Project itself the way of doing this is if you go to the View Tab, in the Window
Group towards the right hand end one of the options is Switch Windows.
And if you click there you’ll see a list of the open projects.
And all you need to do is to select the one that you want to work on and then you’ll
be taken into that one.
So there’s a couple of options there for switching between open projects.
So by now you should have enough tools and techniques to create a project, save it, close
it, open it again, work on more than one project at a time.
And it’s time for you to do the first course exercise.
That’s what I’m going to set you in the next section
so
please join me for that.