In the previous section we looked at Project Information and the importance of that in
terms of initially setting up a project like this one.
You’ll soon get used to the fact that it’s very, very important that you always make
sure you’ve got either your project start date or your project finish date defined before
you do any significant amount of work on a new project.
Now I’m going to add some more tasks to this project but before I do we also need
to look at a couple of settings in Project Options.
Now you should remember that we access Project Options from Backstage View so click on File,
Options, and then the page we want; in this case, it’s the Schedule page.
So the section we need is this one, Scheduling options for this project.
Note that there is a drop down at the top there, House build 01.mpp it currently says.
If I click on the drop down, I get a choice between the options for all new projects or
the options for this specific project.
Now at this stage, I’m only going to work on the options for this specific project but
it may well be that you always do have the same options in this section for all of your
projects in which case make sure you’ve got them the same in the all new projects
case.
But let’s just look at this specific project now, so select that.
Earlier on we setup new tasks are created auto scheduled.
The second item here is Auto scheduled tasks are scheduled on.
This means when I enter a new task into the schedule and it’s an auto scheduled task
which is the default on, which date is the task scheduled to begin?
And the task is scheduled to begin on the project start date.
Now there are actually two options here.
Project start date is one, the other one is current date.
And I’m going to choose current date.
That means that when I enter an auto scheduled task, it will be scheduled to begin on today’s
date, the date that I’m actually entering the task.
Now alongside that the duration will be entered in and you can choose units for duration.
You can choose minutes, hours, days, weeks, months.
For this building type project days is a pretty good option because you mostly manage those
things in number of days.
But obviously if you were dealing with a very short term project, a very short term task,
you might want to go for minutes or hours.
Maybe a much bigger more strategic type of project you may want task to be in weeks or
months.
Days is the option we’re going to use here.
I’ll come back to this work as entered in and default task type and new tasks are effort
driven.
I’ll come back to all that when we talk about work a little bit later on in the course.
But there are a couple of other options here that we need to look at now.
The pair of options we need to look at is this little pair on the right here.
Show that scheduled tasks have estimated durations and new scheduled tasks have estimated durations.
And this pair of options is what’s caused the behavior we’ve seen so far whereby whenever
we insert a new task, it has an estimated duration.
It’s estimated at one day.
I quite like this option because it means that when a task is inserted, there’s a
question mark on the duration that just reminds me that I need to put my own hopefully more
accurate and realistic estimate in there.
And until I’ve put my proper estimate in there, that question mark just acts as a bit
of a sort of aide memoir that I still need to put my estimate in.
So I generally have both of those checked and basically having checked that they’re
set, I’m now going to enter one or two more of the tasks for this project.
So click on OK and away we go.
So the next task is that one, just click away.
Lay foundations.
I’m going to allow 15 days for that.
Okay.
Now I can see a problem because I can’t actually see that task.
I’m currently looking at the first one, a 10-day task from early March.
It doesn’t actually show the end of March so I’m going to use that zoom control that
we looked at earlier on.
At the right hand end of the status bar, if I click on the minus, it zooms out.
Watch what happens when I click on the minus.
I zoom out of the time frame.
Let’s use the slider to just slide along.
Let’s zoom out one more step and now I can see the beginnings of my building project.
And note that the new task, the Lay foundation task, has actually been added with its start
date today because I set the option of new tasks get a start date of current date.
Now I don’t necessarily need that gap that I’ve got now between my tasks so let me
just click on that date picker again and say that can start a week earlier.
Now, I’m then given this option from what’s called the Planning Wizard in Project 2013
and what the Planning Wizard does is as I work, it tries to spot for me anything I may
have missed.
Now what it thinks has happened now is it’s seen me put in a first task and a second task.
The second task is starting just after the first task and it’s saying maybe these should
be linked.
Maybe you should be saying that that second task can start when the first one’s finished.
Now when it suspects that there could be a linkage between these two tasks, it gives
me a choice.
It says you can link them so that Lay foundation will always follow Prepare site or you can
move Lay foundation without adding a link.
Now for the moment, I’m going to move them without adding a link.
I’m just going to click on OK.
We’ll come to links a little bit later on.
And now it’s just move that so that I haven’t got that big gap between the two tasks.
There is a gap but it actually corresponds to the weekend.
So let me put in the next task.
Build walls, I’m going to say 10 days.
Now note in this case that that’s overlapping laying the foundations.
Now we’re clearly going to have to fix that later on because generally speaking, you’re
not going to be able to start on the walls until the foundations are set but we’ll
worry about that little one a little bit later on.
So I could carry on now and add the other two main tasks that I’m going to put in
at this stage.
But first of all, I’d like to show you one other thing.
If you go back into Backstage View, down into the options and on the Display page, one of
the options right at the bottom there is Entry Bar, check Entry Bar, click on OK, and you
get an entry bar.
It’s a bar.
It’s a bit like the entry bar in Excel if you’re used to using Excel.
And instead of typing into the task name or in fact any other cell in this table, you
can type in the entry bar instead.
So if my next task is Fit windows and doors, when I’ve typed what I want to type, I can
click on the tick to commit the change or on the cross to cancel it.
So I’m going to click on the tick at this stage and that’s an alternative to clicking
elsewhere within the Gantt Chart in general in order to commit a piece of typing.
Click in the next cell and again you note that the one day question mark is selected.
I can just click in the entry bar and change that, say, to 12 days, click on tick.
Some people prefer to use the entry bar than typing directly into the table here.
I actually quite like using the entry bar but I pretty much use either depending on
the situation that I’m in.
If you don’t want to use the entry bar, it does take up a little bit of space on the
screen, if you don’t need it you just switch it on and off in the Project Options as you
saw just now.
And talking of saving some space, what I’m going to do now is to switch off the timeline
because I’m not going to be using it for the moment.
Go to the View tab on the Ribbon and in the Split View Group, uncheck Timeline and then
I’m going to put in the fifth of these tasks.
The fifth task is going to be Fit roof and that’s going to be another 15 day task and
in this case I’m just going to type in there 15 days.
Note that’s also scheduled starting today.
A bit of work to do on my schedule obviously but we’ll come back to that a little bit
later on.
Now in case you’ve had any trouble following this so far I’m now going to save this project
file as the first of the example files that are available to you that came with the course.
Just to show you again, you can do a file Save As.
This time I’m going to the folder that has the accompanying files in it and that is the
one.
It’s ssi-project2013-example_01.mpp, save there.
And then before I finish this section, just one other thing, if you go into Backstage
View and the Info tab on the right you’ll see Project Information.
This gives summary information about the project that I’m working on.
So in this case it says the start date is March 4th, the finish date is now April 12th.
So, according to my current building schedule that’s when the last task will finish.
I know that’s not right but that will be corrected as we go along.
And then there’s information like schedule from, current date, start date, when it was
last modified, today, the project calendar priority.
If I click on the arrow to the right of Project Information, I see that I have Project Statistics
that we’ll look at later.
But I also have Advanced Properties.
Now with the Advanced Properties, I can set some properties that are really more related
to the file than they are to the actual workings of Microsoft Project.
So apart from showing me this file name, I can put in a subject, the author, and I suggest
that as you work on your projects you put your own author name in there.
Bear in mind that if you setup your Project Options with your author name anyway, it will
appear in there by default.
So when you’ve entered or reviewed any of these properties click on OK and then, of
course, after you finished changing any of those properties you need to go back and do
another save.
You can use the Save button on the Quick Access Toolbar.
So that’s the first of the sample files.
If you open that now you should get a project that’s exactly where this one is.
That’s it for this section.
I’ll see you in the next one.