Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.
In this section we’re going to look at some other basic properties of tasks.
And I’m going to return to that first version of the wedding plan.
And the first thing I want to look at is the duration of a task.
Now if I look at that first task, the one with the name Planning, and click in the duration
field, the duration as I explained earlier has a default value of one day with a question
mark indicating that it is an estimated duration.
I can use these little rollers to increase the duration.
Note that as soon as I do that what Project assumes I mean is that the estimation part
of it is gone and I’m now saying, for example, that that is a two day task.
And of course I can increase that duration pretty much as much as I want to.
Or if I decided I’ve overdone it I can decrease it again.
Now I don’t have to use those rollers.
If I, for instance, went to the Attire field I can literally click in that field and type
a date either looking at the field itself as I do it or of course looking at the entry
bar.
So I could for example say three days and tick that.
And as you can see as I adapt and adjust the duration of the tasks the bar in the Gantt
Chart on the right extends accordingly.
Now we haven’t actually looked at the definition of working days and working weeks and working
hours yet but you can probably see from that that when I’m talking about, for example,
an eight day task I’m talking about eight working days and that doesn’t include days
at the weekend with the current calendar that I’m using on this project.
Now look very carefully at the Bar Chart on the right because for the tasks that still
have a one day estimated duration you’ll see that at the right hand end of each of
those you’ve got that vertical line.
Now it’s pretty much coincidence that it’s at the right hand end of those bars.
That vertical line indicates the current date.
That’s the today line.
So at any point you can see where today is in relation to the project.
Or if you like where the project is in relation to today.
And we talked already about project start date.
Supposing I was entering this project and in fact the various aspects of it had started
a couple of weeks ago.
I’m a bit late setting the project up in Project 2016.
So some of these things have happened already.
What I could do is to change the project start date.
So look, for example, at that first planning task, Thursday, December 17th, the start date.
That’s the date that I entered it yesterday and that is currently the start date for this
project.
Let’s go into the Project Information and change the start date to a date two weeks
ago, December the 4th.
Click on OK.
None of the durations have changed but each of the tasks has a new start date.
Now of course I could change individual task start dates.
So for instance, if I wanted to change the date that Attire task is starting, if I click
in the start field and click on the dropdown I get a Date Picker.
And if I decided well we’re going to need to look at Attire.
We’re going to need to start to sort clothes out but we’re not really going to be able
to do that until after the Christmas holiday.
So let me go right on the month there.
Let’s go into January and let’s say that we’re going to start that on say Tuesday,
the 5th of January.
So that’s when that task is going to start.
Now in doing that one of the problems I have is that that task is now shut off to the right
in my chart and I can no longer see it.
That may or may not be a problem but you know how to resolve that already because you know
about the Zoom Slider.
So let’s zoom out a bit.
That’s better.
Now I can see that Attire task in January 2016.
And of course if I wanted to I could not only set the duration of each of these tasks but
I could start to actually set them out in time.
So for instance I could decide on a wedding day and assuming that I’m confident we’d
be ready for that I could plot that at some time next year as well.
And similarly for each of those other tasks I could set up duration, I could decide on
a start date and I could start to put my project plan together with a lot more care and attention
and hopefully with a lot more resemblance to what actually is going to happen.
And that is indeed what we are going to be doing over the next quite a few sections.
However, this project if it just comprised those roughly ten tasks would not be a very
realistic project.
And so we need to put in a lot more detail to make this into a realistic planning exercise.
Now in order to do that you need to know quite a lot more about tasks.
You need to know about dependencies and you need to know about resources.
And one of the next things I’m going to tell you about, in fact I’m going to start
on that in the next section, is you need to understand summary tasks and outlining.
But for the balance of this section I want to look just at information about tasks.
We’ve seen task name, duration, start date, finish date.
I mentioned work once or twice.
But in fact for any task in Project 2016 there is an awful lot of information about that
task available and that you may need to be able to manipulate in some way.
Now I’ve got the Attire task selected and what I’m going to do is to right click on
that row, bring up the contextual menu, and one of the options about fourth from the bottom
there is Information.
I’m going to click on Information.
And it brings up the Task Information dialogue.
Now this is a dialogue with half a dozen tabs and each tab has information about the selected
task.
Much of the information won’t mean very much at the moment.
By the end of the course most of it will.
And some things, I think the descriptions you can see here, pretty much explain what
that particular piece of task information is about.
So for instance, you know about name but percent complete how much of that task have we done?
We haven’t done any of it, 0% complete.
It’s an auto-scheduled task.
I briefly explained what that means.
You can see the start date and the finish date there.
It’s not an estimated duration so that checkbox is ticked.
Three day task and it has a priority of 500.
Now the other properties on this particular tab are ones we’re going to be looking at
later on.
But let’s look at the other tabs.
What are its predecessors?
Which tasks must happen before this one?
Or in some way that it depends on?
Which resources does it use?
There’s also an Advanced Tab with information like deadlines, constraints, specific calendars
to use and so on.
Virtually all of these we’re going to be looking at during the course.
We can record notes about the task and we can even set up custom fields with custom
information about the task.
So that’s the Task Information for the Attire task.
Let me Cancel that and just point out something I’ve mentioned a couple of times before.
Task Information is a good example of something which you can get at in a variety of different
ways.
So with that same Attire task selected if I go to the Task Tab on the Ribbon there is
a button in the Properties Group, Information, that brings up exactly the same dialogue.
And in fact if I double click on the task that brings up that dialogue as well.
So there are many ways of bringing up task information.
But access to that dialogue and the contents of it are going to be very important to you.
And if you want to do a little bit of extra reading note the Help button there.
That’s it for this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.