Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016 Advanced.
We’re currently looking at reporting in Project 2016 and in the previous section we
started to customize the Project Overview Report or rather a copy of the Project Overview
Report.
And I left you with something to check at the end of the preceding section and that
was what the filter upcoming milestones actually does because that’s the filter that drives
the table on the lower left there, the Milestones Due table.
Now you can’t actually see directly from here what a filter does but if you go back
to Gantt Chart view, for example, and go to the View tab, go to Filters, More Filters,
and go down to Upcoming Milestones, click on Edit, you can see that filter.
And the filter is made up of two conditions.
First of all Milestone equals Yes and secondly Percent Work Complete isn’t 100%.
So we're looking for incomplete milestones.
Now when it says Upcoming that doesn’t mean within a certain period of time.
That just means any incomplete milestone.
So we see all non-completed milestones in this particular report.
Now during the balance of the course we’re going to be looking at a number of different
reports and it’s sometimes useful just to be able to go back like this and check, for
example, what a particular filter does or maybe how a particular custom grouping works.
Let’s now turn our attention to the other table, the Late Tasks table.
As soon as I click into that table you see the Field List appear.
Note that if at any time you don’t see the field list and perhaps you’ve accidently
or intentionally closed it you can show it again, for instance, from the Table Tools
Design tab.
You just click on Table Data.
It’s currently selected which means that the field list is shown.
I can un-show it and show it like that.
Having said that you’ll not only be able to show it and use it when it can be used.
So when you are say working on the data in a table or a chart.
If you just had, for example, the cursor in the header here which is a textbox there are
no fields there and therefore you cannot select fields for that particular element in the
chart.
Now in the case of the table on the right we have six fields instead of just two as
we have in Milestones Due.
And underneath the tree view where we select the fields for a table or indeed for a chart
as we’ll see in a little while you can see that list of fields.
As you select and deselect fields they appear within this list.
You can also use this list to change the sequence.
So for instance, if in that table I wanted Duration immediately after Name I could click
on Duration there and drag it up to be just after Name and that would change the sequence
of columns in the table.
Similarly if I didn’t want to see Duration anymore if I right click on it on that list
one of the options is Remove Field.
And Project 2016 removes that field from the table and of course adjust the column widths
in the table to use the now available space.
If I wanted to switch Duration back on again I can scroll down to find it in the list of
fields, select Duration and it’s back again.
It appears there in the final column.
So if I wanted to put it back in its earlier position I can just drag it back to there.
So working on that principle if I went back to the table that contains the percent complete
and decided that what I really want to show in my Project Overview is not just percent
complete but also the percentage of work that’s complete because percent complete refers to
the amount of time that’s complete.
If I go to the Field List, check Percent Work Complete as well I have a second column in
that table.
It makes my Project Overview just that little bit more informative.
Now the fact that I’ve used 56% of the time to do 43% of the work doesn’t necessarily
mean that I’m behind schedule because the work may not be evenly distributed over the
time.
But those two figures together can often give a quite important message.
Now in this particular table we concentrated on looking at the data in the table.
Of course there are design elements to this table as well.
We probably want to change its style to look like the other tables to some extent.
But apart from the styling which we’re really going to concentrate on in the next section,
if when you’re working on a table you go to the Layout tab in Table Tools there are
a number of things that you can do there.
For instance, if I select the Late Tasks table, in the Table Size group there’s an option
to set the width of the table.
So if I wanted to adjust this using actual measurements rather than dragging the edges
of the table to visually resize the table I can set the actual measurements using the
rollers there for width and height.
I can also go in and set the widths of individual columns.
So looking at this particular example I definitely could do with a little bit more space for
resource names.
So why don’t I make one or two of the other columns a little bit narrower?
Say Percent Complete could go a little bit narrower.
If I click in the Percent Complete header there is a Cell Size group.
And within that I can set the width and height of individual cells, whichever is the currently
selected cell.
I also have a couple of buttons here to distribute the widths and heights of columns, distribute
columns, distribute rows evenly.
So let’s reduce the width of that a little bit.
You notice that the heading text starts to turn at that point, which is not so good.
You can in fact change text direction if you start to get that sort of problem.
So with that Percent Complete header still selected I could turn it.
So rotate all text 270o.
That would turn the text in the header.
And if I then made the header row taller I could adjust it so that you could read Percent
Complete fully there.
So once again let me make sure I’m clicked back in that column and let me make the width
a little bit less still.
And then I could go back to the Resource Names column, reset the width of the Resource Names
column, allow a bit more space for that and the whole table could be made just a little
bit wider to use up some of the space that I’ve saved.
So you can use the Layout tab and a judicious amount of dragging on row heights and column
widths to achieve a better layout for any table as well.
So we’ve looked at how to choose what data is shown in a table and how to change the
layout of a table and we’re going to concentrate on design elements in a bit more detail in
the next section.
For the balance of this section I’m going to turn our attention to charts because much
of what you’ve learned about tables will apply to charts as well but there are a couple
of added features that I need to explain as well.
So let’s take a look at the Percent Complete chart up here.
And the first thing to note when I click on it is that by now you should be able to look
at the field list on the right and just assess how the contents of this chart are put together.
So the first thing to look at at the bottom of the field list pane is the filter.
This is showing active tasks.
There’s no grouping but we’re showing Outline Level 1.
So these are in effect the top level tasks.
Often they’re summary tasks but not necessarily.
Just whatever is at the level below Project Summary.
Also note that there’s no sorting applied here.
So normally they would just be sorted by default, by ID.
And looking at the field list pane again as you can see we are showing just Percent Complete.
Now with the particular type of chart that we have here it really is only appropriate
to have a single field because with this column chart the value in that field determines the
height of the column.
You can of course have different types of column chart and we’ll be looking at those
later on where there may be more than one column for each value on the horizontal axis.
But we’ll come to that a little bit later on.
The other aspect of this chart though is what is happening on the horizontal axis.
Now the variable that’s represented on the horizontal axis is normally referred to as
the category variable in Project 2016 charting.
And above the field list you have something that you don’t get when you’re looking
at selecting data for a table and that is you get a dropdown to select category.
Now what categories are available will very much depend on the type of chart.
But at the moment if I click on the dropdown one of the options available to me is Name.
That’s Task Name and of course that’s the one that’s selected at the moment.
If instead I selected ID you would see the same information but on the horizontal axis
you can see the IDs of those level one tasks that are shown in this chart.
So let me go back to Name.
And regarding the chart itself, you can see now basically what data is shown and we’re
going to talk about the type of chart in a little bit more detail in a moment.
But within the chart there are a number of selections that you can make.
The chart itself is actually made up of a number of elements and we’ll talk about
formatting and design in relation to those again a little bit later.
But for example, what we have here is the vertical axis and the labeling on the vertical
axis.
What we have here is the horizontal axis.
Each of these is an individual bar and we can format individual bars.
But what I want to concentrate on first here are these three buttons on the right here
because these are some of the quickest and easiest tools that enable you to change certain
elements of the chart as to whether they’re shown or not.
You can change some styling of the chart, although we are going to concentrate on that
in the next section.
And you can also apply filters to the chart.
So let’s start with that first button, this one whose screen tip is Chart Elements.
With this you can determine what’s shown as part of the chart.
Now this is a great one for you to experiment with yourself.
You don’t need me to go through all of this.
Just try it out yourself.
For instance, if I wanted to show a data table.
If I check Data Table watch what happens.
I now have a little table of data underneath.
And it actually gives me the numerical values that each of the column heights represents.
To remove the data table again I just uncheck it.
Maybe I’d like a legend.
And the legend appears on the right.
Now in this case we only have a single bar so the legend is very simple and that is that
the color of the bar represents percent complete.
Try each of those out yourself and just get used to what each of those chart elements
is.
Now the next option, the one that’s like a little brush gives me access to the Style
and Color options.
I am going to concentrate on style in the next section as I mentioned earlier.
I’m just going to bring this up now.
I should warn you that there seems to be some problem either in Project 2016 or in the driver
on the PC I’m recording this on that this does flash a little.
So I’m only going to bring this up very, very briefly and then close it down again.
If I click on that button, note that the screen tip is Chart Styles, you see a list of the
styles and I could choose an alternative style if I wanted to such as that one.
And then I also have access to changing the color scheme.
So if I wanted to employ a different color scheme I could maybe choose that.
Note that it’s pretty straightforward as well of course to resize a chart.
If I select this chart I can actually pull it over say to be a similar width to the width
of the table beneath it.
And the third option there is the Filter option.
That lets me filter either series, so basically the series are the vertical values.
Now in this case I’m only showing a single series, that’s Percent Complete.
In a chart where I maybe was showing two, three, four, or more vertical values, so some
sort of clustered column chart for example, I could select which of the vertical values
I wanted to show at any time.
And similarly with the categories, so this is the horizontal categories, at the moment
I’ve got them all selected.
Let me deselect all.
Let’s suppose I only wanted to show Requirements and Testing.
I could check those two, click on Apply and then I would only see those two in my chart.
Let me go back to selecting all again.
Click on Apply and I’m back to showing all of them.
So we’ve covered most aspects of how to get the data that you need into a report.
We’ve looked at quite a few aspects of formatting.
We’ve looked at design a little as well.
In the next section we’re going to fill in a few gaps in relation to design and formatting
and look at some additional general points in relation to reporting.
But that’s it for this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.