Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
In this section we’re going to look in more detail at customizing reports.
And in order to do this I’m going to customize one of the most commonly used reports in Project
2016.
Now if you’ve used an earlier version of Project you may be very familiar with the
Project Overview.
And in versions before Project 2013 the Project Overview looks very different to the way that
it looks now.
The one big advantage of the modern approach to a Project Overview is that it can be highly
customized to suit your specific requirements.
Now we’re using version 11 of the website project here and I’m going to go to the
Report tab, go to the Dashboards and click on Project Overview.
Now depending on themes, styling, etcetera your Project Overview may not look quite the
same as mine but don’t worry about that because that won’t significantly change
what we’re covering in this section for you.
Now one thing you’ll note here is that I have got page breaks switched on.
And I usually work with page breaks switched on.
It’s not a completely foolproof way of judging how big a report is going to be because whereas
some things, for example the width of that textbox are going to be of a fixed size other
things such as the height of a table may vary depending on how many rows are in the table
at any particular point that you create a version of a report.
But I do tend to keep the page break markers on myself and that usually helps me at least
with the width of a report.
So let’s look now at the elements of this particular report.
In the previous section I discussed the heading and once again here if I click within Project
Overview you can see that it’s a textbox with the word Project Overview in it.
You can also see that because of the way this Project Overview is made it’s actually rather
carelessly put together because the textbox containing the word Project Overview is actually
overlapping the text above the column chart on the right there.
Now of course you don’t really see this because the textbox doesn’t have a border
and the textbox itself is transparent.
But sometimes when you do this kind of thing and particularly if for example the text in
that textbox might be variable you could run into trouble.
So I do tend to try to make sure that there isn’t really any possibility of the elements
in my report running over each other.
Now we’re looking here at the Project Overview.
The first thing I’m going to do is to save this as my copy of a Project Overview.
So I go to Manage, click on Rename Report, call it TA Project Overview.
And in doing that I’ve now actually got two versions of the Project Overview.
I’ve got the original version, Project Overview, and TA Project Overview is the one that I’m
going to be working on.
So the first change that I’m going to make to the Project Overview is to change the width
of that textbox.
Now it’s only ever going to say Project Overview so I don’t need to worry about
any variability in the size of the text.
Obviously if I made the font bigger at some later point in time I may need to change this
but for the moment that’s going to do the job for me.
I’m also going to click in there, right click, click on Paragraph and center the text
in the textbox.
Now at the moment I’m not going to do any other stylistic changes to that heading.
So click on OK and that’s my first change made.
Now the next item in the report says Monday, Feb 1, ‘16, Thursday Oct 27, ‘16.
And these currently are the start and finish dates of this project.
Now although that looks straightforward enough if you think about how those dates managed
to get there you may wonder just how you find for a report the start and finish dates of
the project.
You may also be wondering how they are presented in the way that they are in this report.
Now if I click say in the finish date somewhere, and this is usually the way to find out how
something is working, you will see how that particular element of the report is implemented
because it’s implemented as a table.
And the way that you can tell that is by looking up at the ribbon and seeing that when I clicked
in there the Table Tools were actually enabled.
So in terms of how that finish date is actually presented it’s in a table.
If I click in the start date that’s in a table as well.
They’re not actually in the same table.
And in fact if you click you can see that they overlap with each other.
But one important feature of how they’re done here is that by putting them in a table
you have access to field values.
And the particular task that enables you to find the start and finish date of a project
is the Project Summary Task.
So if you look over at Field List on the right, let me just make this a little bit wider,
and look down at Outline Level the level we’re looking at in the Table Element on the right
there, the one that currently contains Thursday, October the 27th 2016.
The outline level is Project Summary Level.
And for the Project Summary Task which is the only task at the Project Summary Level
the field that is selected is the finish date.
So basically we have a table with a single field value for a single task.
The single task is the Project Summary Task and the single field value is the finish date.
And basically that explains also where Monday, February the 1st 2016 comes from because again
we’ll be using the Project Summary Task but this time that will use the start date.
So these two little tables are not very well set up because apart from the fact that they
crash into each other the one on the left with the start date seems to have the text
left justified, the one on the right with the finish date also seems to have the text
left justified which doesn’t really make any sense because you really want the first
one left justified and the right one right justified.
And in fact it’d be nice to have like a little dash between them or something like
that.
So first of all I’m going to move the right hand table right.
Make sure it’s selected, continuous border around it and then use the right arrow on
the keyboard to move it over.
Now at this stage I’m definitely not going to worry about making all of this align very
exactly.
I’m just trying to get the overall content and the overall layout correct.
There’s no point in going for absolute accuracy until I’m sure that I’ve got all of the
basic elements of the report in place.
So let me change the alignment on that right hand table, the one with the finish date in
it, to be right aligned.
So that’s straightforward enough.
Go into the Table Tools Layout Tab, click on Right Alignment and that’s now right
aligned.
I also don’t actually need that to be quite as wide as that.
I need to allow for, for instance a wider day, Wed, W-E-D, is going to take up more
space than Thur.
And then let’s go to the start date.
No maybe that’s about right.
And now what I’m going to do is to insert a dash between them.
So Report Tools Design and I’m just going to insert a textbox.
Draw it in here for the moment.
And I’m just going to put a dash in there and I’m going to center align it in that
box.
And again I won’t worry about too much else about that in terms of more exactly aligning
it for the moment.
Maybe come back to that later.
Something else you will notice here is that the start and finish dates for the project
to the left and right of our new textbox have a gray font, the text is a lighter color than
say in Project Overview above.
If I just click into one of those tables now and click the Design tab and click on the
launcher at the bottom right hand corner of WordArt Styles it brings up a Format Shape
panel on the right.
And at the moment text options are selected.
And here I can format the text.
Click here on the Text fill and outline and look at text fill.
Bear in mind that text fill is the color of the text itself rather than any outline that
may be visible on the text.
You’ll see it’s solid fill and the color, if I click on the dropdown on the right here
is that sort of middle gray on the left there.
It’s White, background one, darker 25%.
That is why that text is that color.
If I clicked inside the Project Overview textbox, looked in the same place I would see that
the color there is that one which is Black, text one, lighter 35%.
Very much darker gray.
So let’s change the color of that dash.
If I click within the textbox with the dash in it, hold the Shift key down and move the
cursor right to make sure I have the dash selected, go over to the Format Shape panel,
make sure I’ve still got text fill solid fill.
Now click on the Color dropdown and choose White, background one, darker 25%.
Although it will be very difficult for you to see at the moment the color of the dash
is now the same color as the text either side.
Now of course I might decide to make the text a lot bigger and make it a bit more obvious
later on and then it would be easier to see that color.
But you can see there how to change the formatting of text in a textbox.
So let’s move onto the next element of this report and not all tables have a single cell,
a single row and a single column.
And the next element is indeed also a table but this table has two rows and one of the
rows, the top row, is in effect a heading.
It says Percent Complete.
And the second row is not a heading.
This one has percent complete for the whole project and therefore as you probably work
out by now the outline level selected is Project Summary Level.
There is only one task at that level, the Project Summary Task, and the particular field
we’re displaying here is the Percent Complete field.
So first of all with that table selected let’s go into the Design tab in the Table Tools
and you can see how we achieve a header row because in the group on the left, Table Style
Options, the Header Row checkbox is checked.
Whereas if I go to one of the tables that we looked at earlier on such as the one there
with the finish date in for example header row is not checked.
Note also on that Design tab how you can choose a table style.
So here if I click back in the Percent Complete table I could choose a different style very
easily from those that are available.
Now the other particular thing I want to do there is to make the table a little bit more
compatible with the widths of the other objects around it.
I’m slightly tempted to center the heading and the percentage but I’ll leave those
for the moment.
Now as we carry on moving down that first column of the report hopefully you’ll start
to recognize things now.
So for instance if I click in the table down there you can certainly see that it’s a
table.
You can certainly see, I hope, that it must have the Header Row checkbox checked there.
You can see the table style.
I want to make it a bit more of the style of the one further up.
A little bit more of that sort of orangey color.
And you can also see that this time I’m not looking at the Project Summary Task.
I’m looking at a very specific selection of tasks.
Now for each of those tasks what I have displayed is the name, note the checkbox there, and
the finish date, note the checkbox there.
And of course name and finish are my headings.
Above the table what I’ve got here is another textbox and it’s another textbox that’s
a little bit wider than it needs to be so let’s just change that now.
So the question here is what is selecting these specific tasks?
Well if you look at the text above it, Milestones Due, Milestones that are coming soon.
There is some sort of filter in force that is causing those tasks to be selected.
And the filter that is in force is this one, the upcoming milestones filter.
So the question is what does the upcoming milestones filter actually do?
And that’s a question I’m going to leave you with.
This not an exercise.
It’s the end of this section.
I want you to find out what the upcoming milestones filter does in Project 2016 in your installation,
bearing in mind of course that somebody may have changed it.
And that’s the point at which we’re going to continue at the next section.
I’ll see you then.