Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. We’re now going to take
a look at Project Options which are normally accessed via Backstage View.
So, click on the File tab for Backstage View and then right at the bottom click on Options.
The Options are arranged into pages and we’ve looked at one or two of the pages already.
We looked at Customize Ribbon and we looked at Quick Access Toolbar. And most of the other
pages we’re going to be looking at throughout the course. But I just want to point out,
first of all, how the options work in general and secondly some of the options that you
should set correctly before you create even your first project with Project 2013. So let’s
get started. So let’s start with that option right at
the top of the General page, User interface options screen tip style. Show feature descriptions
in screen tips. That’s the current setting. Let me just cancel the options again and let’s
look at a button on the View tab here on the right, Macros, and hover over that. Now note
the screen tip is View Macros. You can also see the keyboard shortcut there of Alt plus
F8. Then there is a description, See a list of macros you can work with. That’s to help
you understand what that particular command will do. Now let’s go back into Options
again and let’s change the screen tip style from Show feature descriptions in screen tips
to Don’t show feature descriptions in screen tips. Click on OK. You need to click on OK
to save any changes that you make. And then let’s hover over that same button again
and now it just says View Macros. It doesn’t give a description of what the function does.
Back into Options again, again on the General tab, top option there. Now note Don’t show
screen tips. Well, I don’t think I really need to demonstrate to you what happens if
I select Don’t show screen tips. It means you won’t get any screen tips at all. Now
you might say well why would somebody not want screen tips? Well, the answer to that
is that for some people who’ve been using Project for a while they pretty much know
what all the commands do. And if you’re working particularly on a complex project
and you’ve got some close up type work to do, having things like screen tips and even
having things like the mini toolbar appearing can be quite distracting and some people actually
get quite annoyed by all those little boxes popping up all over the screen. It’s actually
a particular problem when I’m recording this course because you’ll notice at various
times that as I move the mouse around on the screen, all sorts of things pop up and you
may look at it and think that’s really annoying the way those things pop up. Well, sometimes
I will turn those off and sometimes I won’t. I often leave them there because we’re going
to use them again and switching them on and off can be even more annoying than having
them on all the time or off all the time. But you’ll see as we work through the course
how those screens tips popping up everywhere could become annoying. Now I’m going to
leave this set at the original setting, Show feature descriptions in screen tips. I’m
afraid if it does get a bit annoying I apologize for that in advance.
Now I pointed out just now that when you make a change, even changing something back as
I’m doing here, you click on OK to save the changes. There are certain Project Options
where you may even need to close down Project 2013 and restart it for the option to take
effect. When that’s the case, then Project Options tells you that. It says you need to
stop and restart Project for that to take effect. And there are also some options which
will only apply on a project from new. So if you’ve got the option set at the beginning
of working on a project and you changed the option, it may not have effect until you start
another new project. So again that’s one to beware of. But with most options, all you
need to do as with this one is to select the choice you want or enter the number you want
or enter the directory name or whatever you need to set and then click on OK. And as with
this case, if I now hover over that button again I get the screen tip with the description
as well. So they’re some of the general principles
of these Project Options. Let’s look at a couple of the other options on this General
page because you should get those set now. One of them is your name and your initials
to identify you. Now if you’re using Project purely on your own. You’re never going to
share a Project schedule with anybody else then this doesn’t really matter. But if
you are working with other people, you should make sure you’ve got your user name in there
and your appropriate initials as well. This is particularly useful when it comes to sharing
work on projects with other people as we’ll see later on in the course. You can also choose
here your Office background and Office theme. I’ve got no background set and my Office
theme is the white theme. These are both drop downs so you can choose from the available
options. And the bottom option here is actually quite an important one because it’s the
one that determines whether the start screen is shown when you start Project 2013. We’ve
had the start screen shown so far and if you don’t want to see that, if you want to go
straight into the main working area for Project 2013, then all you need to do is uncheck that
box, click OK, and then next time you start Project 2013, you won’t see the start screen.
Now I want to look at couple of options on the Schedule page and in particular I want
to look first at this one within Scheduling options for this project, New task created.
I mentioned this earlier. The value here is Manually scheduled. Now this is a little bit
more difficult to explain to those of you who haven’t used Project scheduling software
before, but you will understand this a little bit later on in the course when we go into
this in more detail. I’ll just give you a fairly brief explanation here. One of the
key strengths of Microsoft Project is its ability to take information about the work
that needs to be done and to come up with a schedule that satisfies all of the constraints
that you put on it. The constraints will include things like how long each task is, how much
works involved, what resources you’ve got available, people, rooms, machinery, and then
also dependency such as one particular task such as painting a window. You can’t do
that until you’ve actually put the window into the wall and things like that. Now it
can take thousands and thousands of pieces of information like that and come up with
a schedule that works. This is auto scheduling, but there is an alternative approach and that
is manual scheduling. And this is basically where you do all the scheduling work. You
work out when each task starts and ends. Now you may think it sounds a bit bizarre to do
manual scheduling yourself when you’ve got Microsoft Project to do it for you, but there
are some situations where manual scheduling is your preferred approach. For example, if
you’re working on a very long project, say something that’s going to last five years,
and at the moment, say, for the next six months you can schedule automatically according to
a set of constraints, estimates, costing, resource availability figures, and so on.
But beyond that you’re not really sure what sort of budget you’re going to have available.
You don’t know what resources you’ll have available and so on. What you may want to
do in that longer term is to just manually schedule some big blocks of activity, say
Phase 2 of the project as a big block, say, for the third quarter of next year. And you
don’t want Microsoft Project to try to reschedule that for you, you just want to show it in
the schedule as a big block that Project won’t move around.
And there are some other situations where you might not want Project to manually schedule
something. Now to be fair, many of the tasks that you might want to manually schedule you
can auto schedule but fix them in time using other approaches but more of that later. For
most people, for most types of project, the best setting for this is not manually schedule
which is the default but auto scheduled because you will find I’m sure that most of the
time auto scheduled is going to be the way that you want to work. Now for some of you,
I’m sure you’ll find over time that this is not the best setting for you, but for most
of you it will be the best setting. In addition to that, if you look at the header on this
section on the Schedule page, Scheduling Options for this project, there’s a drop down here
and the current value of the drop down is All new projects. So by setting that like
that, I’m setting that value for all new projects. If I wanted to do it for one specific
project, click on the drop down, there’s no other projects there at the moment because
I haven’t got a project open. But if I did have a project open, it would appear here
and I could even have a different setting for how new tasks are created for a specific
project. Now I should point out that the setting we’re making here is only the default for
how tasks are created. If you create a task that is auto scheduled, you can manually change
it to being manually scheduled and, of course, you can change manually scheduled tasks to
being auto scheduled as well. So as you would expect, there’s plenty of flexibility there
in Project. So one thing I do want you to do now is to make sure you’ve got that set
at auto scheduled for all new projects as your default and then when we’ve just checked
one other setting, you’re going to click OK to save that.
Okay, the one other setting we need to check is a little bit further down the same page.
It’s the one in the Calculation section. Calculate project after each edit on or off.
Now it’s very important that you have that set to on. On is the default. I’m pretty
sure you’ll find it set to on. Let me just briefly explain what that means. When you
have particularly a very big project, every time you change a piece of information in
the project, if this is set to on, Project recalculates the whole schedule. It takes
every piece of information into account again and whatever change you’ve just made, even
if it’s just to change one task from being three days long to being four days long, it
will recalculate the whole project. Now on a modern computer with reasonably good power,
a reasonable amount of memory, and so on that is virtually instantaneous even with a very
big project. Having said that, if you have an enormous project, a very complex project,
or you have quite an old computer or you don’t have enough resources on the computer for
it to run Project 2013 very quickly, then you may notice that the performance of Project
starts to drag. Every time you make a small change, you have to wait a few seconds before
you can do anything else while it recalculates the project. One option you have is to switch
calculation off. And if you switch it off, what that means is that when you make a change
like changing a duration from four days to five days, it doesn’t recalculate the project.
You make the change, it knows you’ve changed the duration but it won’t recalculate the
project until you manually recalculate it. So what you would do is you’d push a button
on one of the tabs of the Ribbon that says calculate and it recalculates the whole project
at that point in time. Now to be fair, some people prefer not to have calculation on anyway.
They quite like manually recalculating a project. But I would say that for most people, having
it on is a better option because for one thing, depending on some other settings, you immediately
become aware of whether a change you have just made has caused a problem with your schedule.
So making a task a bit longer doesn’t mean that the project can no longer finish on time.
You may want to know about that straightaway rather than waiting until the next time you
manually recalculate the project. So for now and unless you have a pressing reason to do
otherwise , I’d like you to make sure you’ve got that switched on and then we’ll talk
about the consequences of switching it off later on in the project.
So with both of those settings click on OK and those changes will be saved.
What I’d like to look at next is down on the Language page of Project Options, and
here it’s very important to make sure that you have your language setup. I have two languages
setup. I have English United States and English United Kingdom. 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. If you want to
add additional languages or replace the language that you’ve got in your current installation
with a different one you have, if you select a language here, it’s easy to remove it
or to set it as the default using the buttons on the right. And if you want to add an additional
editing language, click on the drop down and there’s a very long, long list of languages
available there. 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. Very important that you have the
right language set and we’ll talk about language a little bit more later on.
So they are the main options that you need to have set before we start. We’ll be setting
various other ones as we go along. Trust Center is very important from the point of view of
security. We’ll be coming back to that right near the end of the course. Add-ins that’s
pretty much outside the scope so I almost certainly won’t need to mention add-ins
again. But on the Advance tab there are several options we’re going to need and similarly
for some of the other pages, Display, Proofing, Save. We’ll be coming back to those later
in the course. So that’s it on Project Options for now.
I’ll see you in the next section.