Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013.
In this section, we’re going to take a quick tour of the Project Workspace.
Now many of the aspects of this will be covered in a lot of detail as we go through the course
but I just want to familiarize you with some of the terminology and some of the parts of
the screen that are going to be very important in the early stages of the course.
Now the first thing to say is that I’ve already mentioned this start screen and there
is an option as we’ll see a little bit later on to suppress the showing of this start screen
and for example to go straight into the last project that you were working on.
Now I normally have the start screen enabled.
It’s a pretty useful way of starting up Project in my opinion.
But that may not suit you and as we’ll see later when we look at Project Options, there’s
a lot of customization that’s possible with the Project workspace.
When you’ve been using Project for a little while, then it’s worth taking a little bit
of time just to make sure that you’ve got it customized to your particular preferences
and requirements.
Now on this start screen, we’ve got an area on the left that lists the recent projects
that we’ve worked on.
We haven’t worked on any projects yet so that area is empty.
There’s an area below that that says Open other projects which gives us access to a
pretty standard Windows browser to open other projects either on this device or available
from this device.
You may for example open a project on a network or on an attached device, maybe a memory stick
or a DVD or something like that.
Now in the top right hand corner of the start screen, you have a pretty standard set of
buttons.
There’s the Help button that we’ve already talked about and then the normal Windows buttons.
So there’s a minimize there.
And because I’m in normal view, there’s a maximize button and, of course, a close
button.
And with each of these there’s an available screen tip just to remind me what each of
the buttons does.
Now bear in mind that different people will have acquired their copy of Project 2013 in
different ways, maybe registered for a trial version, purchased a version.
There will be a Microsoft account that you are currently running Project 2013 under,
and the account that I’m currently running it under is shown there.
You can switch account.
You can run your copy of Project 2013 under different accounts and one of the reasons
for doing that would be that you may run it under a different account that gives you access
to additional or different services from Microsoft.
Now looking at the possibilities here is outside the scope of this course.
So for the purposes of this course, I’ll assume that you have a Microsoft account that
you are running this under and that it’s shown there and you can see mine in the top
right hand corner of the start screen.
Now let’s look at these big buttons on the start screen.
The one that’s highlighted at the moment is blank project and you’ll use that a lot
when you start a new project from scratch.
So you’re really just going to start typing the details of a project into Project 2013
from a blank starting point; a bit like starting a new document in Word.
To the right of that, the next option there is New from existing project.
Now if the sort of projects that you manage tend to be a little bit repetitive, you may
find that there’s a pattern in your projects and you like to take say the last job that
you did, the last project you managed and use that as a starting point for the next
one.
Well, that’s where this particular option comes in handy because if you click that,
you can choose an existing project and use that as your starting point for another one.
Now that’s the basic idea behind templates that I’m going to talk about in a moment
as well.
Below that is another option, New from Excel workbook, and this enables you to import task
type information for example that you have in an Excel workbook and use that as the basis
for a Microsoft Project project.
Now that’s somewhat outside the scope of this course but I’m going to give you a
straightforward example of that later on.
To the right of that is a quite similar option but this relates to SharePoint task lists.
Now if you’ve used Microsoft SharePoint, you’ll be familiar with the concept of a
SharePoint task list.
And like an Excel workbook, you can use a SharePoint task list as a starting point for
a Microsoft Project.
Now that is definitely outside the scope of this course.
The next option just says Welcome to Project and this is a little sort of Wizard demonstration
of creating a very basic project and just a description of the main steps in creating
a project.
I’m not going to go through that now.
It’s a good one for you to try, particularly if you’ve never used Project before.
But it is very basic and everything that’s in it we’re going to be covering during
the course anyway.
So if you are an absolute beginner, give that a little run through and it might give you
a nice introduction to some of the basic concepts of using Project.
Beyond that what we have is a list of templates and templates are basically what in older
terminology would be called boiler plates.
They’re sort of model projects.
They don’t have any specifics in them.
They don’t have specific dates and times, specific costs, or anything like that, but
they give you a model that you can work from.
Now the ones that are shown on the start screen, the first one there is a software development
plan.
Then there’s a new product launch.
That’s a bit more of a sort of marketing related project.
Create a budget, commercial construction, residential construction, a market research
schedule, and so on.
Now there are quite a few of those there.
But in addition, if you look at the top of the start screen, there is a box here where
you can search for an online template.
So if you have a particular topic in mind, a particular need for a Project template,
you can type a certain term in here and then click on the Search button and Project 2013
will search microsoft.com to find supporting materials, including Project templates.
Now there’s some suggested searches here, business, construction, marketing products,
but you’re certainly not restricted to those.
The main example we’re going to use on this course is a construction project so I’m
going to type in here Construction.
I could in fact just click on that link if I wanted to but I’m going to type in here
Construction, and then click on the Search button and see what it comes up with.
And what it comes up with is a list of, well, there are two templates; the ones that we
saw on the start screen.
One for a residential construction and one for a commercial construction, and I could
use either of those as the starting point for my project.
But it also gives me links through to documents related to other Office applications.
So there are six links to Excel documents, seven to PowerPoint, two to Outlook, and four
to Word.
Let’s just click on the Excel ones.
Notice we get a list of six Excel workbooks and any of these may help as well.
These are not Microsoft Project projects.
These are Excel workbooks.
So for instance, there’s a construction proposal.
There is a home construction budget.
That’ll be useful to see the sort of costs associated with home construction.
And there are various other things, construction bid form, inventory list, etc.
So that’s a pretty useful facility whereby you can search microsoft.com that way to help
you with your particular requirement for creating a project.
Now you’ve finished looking at these you use the Back button, the top left there.
This is a browser based system as well.
Click on Back and that takes us back to the start screen again.
Now I should just point out to those of you who are using touch that we haven’t done
anything unusual here.
I’m going to come to touch in more detail in a couple of sections time.
But all we’re doing so far is tapping on controls such as this Search button and then
typing into boxes so exactly the same there with touch.
You would just type in the term that you wanted to search for and then tap on the Search button.
So to complete our look at the Project workspace, let’s create a blank project.
Either click on Blank project or tap if you’re using touch, and look at the bottom left hand
corner of the screen just after we do this.
A message appears there, New tasks are created in manually scheduled mode.
You’re going to see that quite a bit and we’ll come back to that in a lot of detail
later on.
But for now I want you to just ignore that message each time it appears.
And what we have now is the Project workspace in front of us.
Now the one that you see may have differences to mine for all sorts of reasons.
So I’m not going to be very specific at this stage about exactly what you can see
but I will point out the main areas and then we’ll look at the details as we go through
the course.
So let’s start right at the top of the workspace here and in the top left we have something
called the Quick Access Toolbar and I’m going to look at that in detail a little bit
later on, but basically it’s a customizable set of buttons that give you one click access
to specific functions such as saving the current project.
At the top on the right, you have the buttons we’ve talked about already, Help, Minimize,
Maximize, Close, and then you also have a set of buttons immediately below that are
related to the current project.
You can have more than one project open at a time in Microsoft Project.
And also identification for the current account, that’s me Toby Arnott there.
Now this whole area excluding the button with File written on it, the green one, is basically
the Ribbon.
Basically the Ribbon contains the commands that you execute to do particular things like
delete a task or remake your schedule or update the status of a task in your project.
Below the Ribbon, we have the timeline.
Now the timeline can be switched on and off and this is one of the areas where what you
see may be different from what I see.
Currently, the timeline is switched on but this is a completely empty project.
There are no tasks in it so there’s nothing shown in the timeline.
There is a start date which is today.
I’m doing this on Monday, March the 18th and there’s a finish date which is the same
day because, again, I haven’t put any tasks in so I have a project with no duration at
the moment.
Below that is the main window area where most of the project information is shown.
And on the left on its side you can see it says Gantt Chart.
You’ll probably use Gantt Charts quite a bit with Microsoft Project.
And as you’ll see in a short while what the Gantt Chart normally consists of is two
parts.
On the left you have what’s called a table and this is the list of information about
the tasks in your project.
And on the right, you have the Gantt Chart itself which will basically be a pictorial
representation of your project.
Now we’re going to look at a sample project shortly and then when we do I’ll explain
in more detail about the table and about the chart itself.
Right at the bottom of the window, there you can see the status bar and the status bar
contains on the left assorted information about the current project.
Now the current project is empty so there isn’t an awful lot of interesting information
to show so there’s not a lot shown there.
But we’ll look at the status bar in quite a bit of detail a bit later on.
And then on the right hand end, there are various buttons and a slider to control what
you actually see in that main window.
Again, we’ll be coming back to that a little bit later on as well.
So we’ve got the Ribbon, we’ve got the timeline, we’ve got the main window which
will often show the Gantt Chart but it can often show other things as well, and then
at the bottom the status bar.
Now there’s one other very important aspect of the Project workspace to mention here and
that is Backstage View.
If you click on that green button towards the top left hand corner of the window that
says File, click on that, it takes you into Backstage View.
Now from Backstage View, you basically do the management, the administration of Project.
Loosely speaking, this is where you do the things related to projects that aren’t actually
in the individual projects themselves.
So it’s the sort of things you do here are open a project, one you worked on earlier
on or save a project or print some of the details of a project or share a project with
somebody else.
You also very importantly, as we’ll see in a couple of sections time, can set your
Project Options which basically enables you to customize Project.
And you also have an Account button here where you can change the account that you’re running
Project under.
I mentioned that earlier on in the course.
Now Backstage View we’re going to look at piece by piece as we go through the course,
but getting access to Backstage View is via that File button, the green button with the
word File on it.
And to get back from Backstage View into the project we’re working on, we click this
Back button up here, the one with the left arrow on it.
It takes us back into an individual project.
So that’s it on the Project workspace for now.
There are quite a few more things but we’ll cover those as we go through the course.
That’s the end of this section.
I’ll see you in
the next one.