Hello everyone, this is Archana.
Today, I'm going to teach you to create project templates using Microsoft Project 2013.
Creating project templates is one of the best practices in project management.
Say, for example, you had a project which really went well and you know your organization
might have some similar projects in future.
So what you can do is you can save your current project schedule as a template for these future
projects as a part of lessons learned during the closing phase of your project.
Creating project templates is quite simple in Microsoft Project 2013.
The first step is to open the project with which you'd want to create your project template.
And now, click on "File", and in the back stage area click on "Options", in the "Project
Options" window, click on the "Save" option.
In the "Save template" section, you can specify the location where you want to store all your
project templates.
In the previous version of Microsoft Project, which was Microsoft Project 2010, all the
templates were stored in a default location.
However, you can very well see that in Microsoft Project 2013 you can have your own customized
location.
So I'm planning to store all my project templates on my desktop.
Now I click "OK" and this is going to be my default location.
If you really want, you can store all your templates in a shared drive so that it is
accessible across your department and organization.
Now click on "OK" button.
So now we have specified location where you would want to store all your templates.
Now, the process of creating templates; click on "File" once again and click on "Save As".
Now, I know that all my templates are going to be stored on my desktop so I'm going to
access it, "Browse", "Desktop" and I'm going to specify a name for my template which is
going to be like Demo 1.
And you have to specify your type as project template.
This stores all your Microsoft Project Templates as .mpt files - which is Microsoft Project
Template files.
Now click on the "Save" button.
Now in this window, you can actually choose to remove the values from your project.
For example, you might opt to choose to remove your actual values, resource rates, fixed
costs and other values which are quite private or quite confidential to your project.
In this case currently I'm trying to remove all the values like baseline values and other
values.
And hit on the "Save" button.
And now my project template is done.
So what I can do is go ahead and close the project template in order to be able to use
it, "File", and hit on "Close".
Now in order to use my project template, I have to click on "New" and now you can very
well see that I have a new tab called "Personal" which was not available before because I had
not specified a location where my templates would be stored.
Now when I hit on "Personal", now you can very well see the demo on template that we
created.
So let us try creating a project from the template that we created.
So for that, click on "Demo 1" and this opens a pop-up where you can specify a project's
start date.
By default, a project's start date is the current date.
However, I would want my project to start say, for example, on November 10th.
And you hit on the "Create" button.
So can you see that the project starts on 10th of November?
And if you had noticed previously, the previous project was somewhere in the previous months.
So with this, we are done with creating templates.
I also have a blog on the same topic at our EPMA website.
I hope this was useful.
Thank you all for watching my video, bye bye.