Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this short section, I’d just like to
look at the contextual menus that you can see in Project 2013. I’m going to demonstrate
this with a couple of examples using the mouse and then one using touch.
As we saw in the previous section, depending on what you’re doing, you will be able to
see a little sort of fly out menu if you right click. If I right click within a cell in the
table here for the Gantt Chart in this project, the menu that flies out has cut cell, copy
cell, scroll to task, insert task, delete task, a whole range of commands that are relevant
to what I’m looking at, the view I’m in, and what I can possibly do at that point in
time. Notice that many of the commands are grayed out so I can’t actually use those
at the moment. And also notice with some of them, for instance this one, Assign resources
dot, dot, dot. That indicates to me that if I click that, there will be more for me to
do. In this case and in fact in many cases, that means if I click that option I’ll get
a dialog box to work with where I’ll need to make some selections, maybe take some further
actions. So let me just click on that one and that brings up the Assign Resources dialog
that we’ll be looking at later on. Now exactly what you see on that menu depends
on where you are and what you’re doing. So if I were to right click on what is the
graphical part of the Gantt Chart over here, then the menu I get is a very different menu.
It lets me change my settings for grid lines, enables me to format bar styles, work on layout,
but virtually all of the commands there are completely different to the ones on the left.
Similarly, if I go into a different view, so if I went from Gantt Chart View into Network
Diagram View and right click there, again I get a completely different set of commands.
Now as I demonstrated in the previous section, if you want to do right click and look at
the menu you get with touch, then if you tap and hold, so tap, hold till you get the square,
release your finger, up comes a contextual menu. Now in some cases, you won’t directly
get that menu as you do here. You may get a mini toolbar and then there will be a drop
down arrow on the mini toolbar to give you access to the menu and that’s what we saw
in the previous section. So if I now just switch back to Gantt Chart View using touch,
so tap on that command, go back to Gantt Chart, again tap somewhere, hold, bring up the mini
toolbar, tap on the drop down arrow on the right, and that’s how I get my menu. Now,
you’ll see the menu flying off the edge of the screen there. Unfortunately because
of the way I have to record this course, you won’t necessarily always see all of every
menu that I use but I’ll try to make sure that anything on the menu that we’re actually
going to use you can always see. But I hope from that you get the general idea of how
these contextual menus work using either mouse or touch.
Now there’s one other thing I need to look at before we move on and I’m going to cover
that in the next section, and that’s the status bar. Please join me for that.