Hello and welcome back to our course on Microsoft Project 2013.
In this section we’re going to look at opening and saving projects.
So far we’ve opened a project by selecting it from the recent list on the start screen.
Now, of course, over time that recent list is going to tend to get too long to all fit
on the start screen and you’re going to find that things drop off the bottom of the
list.
Now there is a way to some extent of overcoming that and we’ll look at that in just a moment.
But in general terms, if you want to open a project and it isn’t on the recent list
there, you need to look at the option below the list where it says Open other projects.
And if you click on that, it takes you to the Open page in Backstage View.
Now you then have a list of potential locations for a project that you want to open.
At the top of the list, you have the recent projects list.
You can open a project from your SkyDrive.
I’m going to tell you about SkyDrive later on in the course.
But think of it as what many people nowadays refer to as Cloud based storage.
So these are projects that you’ve got stored on Microsoft SkyDrive.
Computer basically takes you to the device that you’re using and allows you to browse
through the device to find a project that you have stored locally.
And at a place, as we’ll see later on, gives us an option to add to this list.
We’ll come back to that later.
For the moment, let’s click on Computer.
Now when you click on Computer, you’re given a list of folders you have recently accessed.
One of those is going to be the one with the example files that come with this course.
So if I click on that, it takes me through to that list of example files.
You’ll have a list, it may not look exactly the same as this but generally speaking it
will be very similar to this.
And from this you could take one of the files that we’ve already worked on, select it,
and then having selected it you can either click Open or you can just double click on
it to open that particular project.
So if I wanted to open example_06, double click and the project opens.
Now let’s suppose that I want to open another project as well.
I’d like to open Project 4.
I don’t need to close Project 6 to do that.
I can go into Backstage View, click on Open, and then if I go for Computer again, instead
of using the recent folders list, I can just use the Browse button down here and that allows
me to browse in pretty much the usual way through the content of my device.
So I can choose from the available disc drives, internal disc drive, memory sticks, network
drives, whatever I’ve got attached to my device, choose an appropriate project and
open it up.
Now one thing to notice when you’re trying to open a project like this is that effectively
Project 2013 filters the files that you’re looking at.
So if I go into a particular folder such as this one the files that it’s showing me
are not every file that’s in that folder.
The filter in force by default is a filter that shows me just the files with extension
MPP and that’s the default extension for Microsoft Project files.
If I click on the drop down on the right here then I can look instead of Project’s MPP
files, I could look for MPT files which are Microsoft Project templates.
And there are various other possibilities such as Excel workbooks because I can import
content for a Microsoft Project file from a workbook, an Excel binary workbook, an Excel
earlier version workbook, and so on.
There are a number of possibilities there, and one of the other options I have is to
specify all files.
And if I select the option of All files, I’ll see all of the files that are in that particular
folder.
So let me choose example_04, click on Open, and now we have Project 4 open as well as
Project 6; although you can only see Project 4 at the moment.
Now when you have more than one Project file open at once, it’s quite straightforward
to switch between them.
One of the options you have is to use the switching facility within Windows.
I’m using Windows 8 here but the switching facility with Windows 7 when you’re in desktop
mode is pretty much the same.
Hold the Alt key down and press the Tab key repeatedly and that will let you step through
all of the available open windows and each of the projects you have open will have a
window that you can switch to using this approach.
From within Project itself, if you click on the View tab one of the groups is Window and
in the right hand top corner of the Window Group there’s a drop down here that says
Switch Windows.
Click on the drop down and it lists the open projects.
Now at the moment we’ve got a tick against example_04.
If I wanted to switch to example_06, I’d select that instead and that takes me to the
Project example_06 that I also have open.
So you can have more than one project open at once.
That’s not a problem.
And whenever you’ve finished working with a project, you have a couple of options.
If you click on Backstage View, File, one of the options there is Close and that will
close the specific project that you have selected in view at the moment.
If you close Project itself, so if you use for example the top right hand button here
to close Project, then it will close all of the individual projects you have open at that
time.
Let’s just close this individual project here by clicking on the Close button back
there is Backstage View.
That closes one project and we’re back to just having Project number 4 open.
The other way that you can close a single project is in a line with the tabs above the
Ribbon, there’s this X at the right here and that Close window closes only the current
project window.
So in this case that will close Project 4.
So if I click on that Close button, Project 4 is closed.
In fact, Project 2013 is still running but I now have no projects open so it waits for
me to either open an existing project or create a new one.
Now let me just go back to that Open page again and again look at this list of recent
projects.
If you hover over one of the recent projects, you can see on the right there that there’s
a little push pin.
And if you have a particular project, say, Project 6 that we don’t want to fall off
of the bottom of the recent projects list.
If you click on the push pin, it pins it to the list which means it stays fixed there
until you unpin it.
If you click on the picture of the pin again, it will be unpinned.
Now exactly the same principle applies on the start screen where you have the list of
recent projects on the left.
You can pin a project there and that way it won’t fall off of the recent projects list.
And as I mentioned earlier that’s one way of overcoming the problem when you’ve been
dealing with a large number of projects, of projects that you access often falling off
of the bottom of the recent projects list.
So that’s enough on opening and closing projects for now.
In the next section we’re going to take a look at saving projects.
So please join me for that.