microsoft project

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Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 8) - Auditing Task Links,Using the Task Inspector

The project schedule is heavily influenced by the linking relationships you establish among tasks. It is very easy to accidentally link tasks or break task links, and if you work with Autolink enabled, some changes you have not noticed might have been made.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 7) - Creating Links by Using the Mouse,Working with Automatic Linking Options

You can use the mouse to link taskbars on the timescale side of the Gantt Chart view, in the Network Diagram view, or in the Calendar view. You can also use the mouse to edit the linking relationship in the Gantt Chart view or the Network Diagram view.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 6) - Creating Links by Using the Entry Table

If you do not remember the ID number of the predecessor, leave the cell you are editing selected while you scroll through the task list to find the predecessor task. Do not select the predecessor; just view its ID number.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 5) - Creating Links by Using the Task Information Dialog Box

You can use the Predecessors tab of the Task Information dialog box to create and edit a selected task’s predecessor links, no matter what view is active

Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 4) - Entering Leads and Lags, Creating Links by Using the Menu or Toolbar

There are several ways to link tasks. One option is to select the tasks and then click the Link Tasks button in the Schedule group on the Task tab.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 3) - Using the Start-to-Start Relationship,Using the Finish-to-Finish Relationship

In the Start-to-Finish relationship, the start date of the predecessor task determines the scheduled finish date of the successor. With this type of relationship, you schedule a task to finish just in time to start a more important task that it supports.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 2) - Using the Start-to-Start Relationship,Using the Finish-to-Finish Relationship

In the Finish-to-Finish relationship, the finish date of the predecessor determines the scheduled finish date of the successor task. In other words, you schedule two tasks to finish at or about the same time.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Linking Tasks (part 1) - Defining Dependency Links

Tasks are linked to show a dependency relationship as predecessor and successor tasks. The predecessor task determines the schedule of the successor, or dependent task.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Defining Task Logic - Manipulating Your Schedule

Microsoft Project is equipped with two key features for manipulating your schedule: the Multiple Undo/Redo feature and the Change Highlighting feature. These features are particularly useful for “modeling” changes or “what-iffing.” They are described in the next two sections.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Accounting for Project Costs - Accounting for Overtime Spent on Project Tasks

If you know that some of the work on your project will be done as overtime work, you can plan for that overtime work before it actually happens. This enables you to more accurately estimate project costs by including overtime rates for resources during the planning process.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Accounting for Project Costs - Comparing Actual Cost and Work Values with the Project Budget

After work on your project has started, and resources have begun recording the actual work, costs, and other values for tasks in your project, you’ll likely want to check in on how those actual values are comparing with the budgeted values you identified when you were planning the project

Microsoft Project 2010 : Creating a Budget for Your Project (part 2) - Adding Values to Budget Resources, Pairing Resources with Budgets

Right now, you have placeholders in your project for each budget in your organization, but we haven’t identified values for those budgets.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Creating a Budget for Your Project (part 1) - Creating and Assigning Budget Resources

The first step to creating a budget for your project is to create resources that represent each budget category in your organization. For example, your organization may have one budget for training costs and another budget for travel costs.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 11) - Inactivating Tasks

You can include tasks in a project plan that you might later decide you don’t want to have completed, but you also don’t want to lose the details about those tasks by deleting them.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 10) - Scheduling Summary Tasks Manually

There may be times, however, when you want to directly enter a duration value for a summary task that is independent of its calculated duration as determined by its subtasks.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 9) - Viewing the Project’s Critical Path

A critical path is the series of tasks that will push out the project’s end date if the tasks are delayed. The word critical in this context has nothing to do with how important these tasks are to the overall project.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 8) - Setting Up a Recurring Task

Many projects require repetitive tasks, such as attending project status meetings, creating and publishing status reports, or running quality-control inspections. Although it is easy to overlook the scheduling of such events, you should account for them in your project plan.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 7) - Entering Fixed Costs

For projects in which you must track budget or financial costs, you may need to work with several different sources of costs. These include costs associated with resources, as well as costs associated directly with a specific task.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 6) - Entering Deadline Dates

One common mistake made by new Project users is to place semi-flexible or inflexible constraints on too many tasks in their projects. Such constraints severely limit your scheduling flexibility.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 5) - Changing Task Types

In previous versions of Project, it was possible (in fact, it is likely) that a resource’s initial assignment units value would change, and this led to unexpected results with regard to the scheduling formula.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 4) - Adjusting Working Time for Individual Tasks

There may be times when you want specific tasks to occur at times that differ from the working time of the project calendar (or for assigned resources, the resource calendar).

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 3) - Interrupting Work on a Task

When initially planning project tasks, you might know that work on a certain task will be interrupted. Rather than listing a task twice to account for a known interruption in work, you can split the task into two or more segments.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 2) - Setting Task Constraints

Every task that you enter into Project has some type of constraint applied to it. A constraint controls the start or finish date of a task and the degree to which that task can be rescheduled.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Fine-Tuning Task Details (part 1) - Adjusting Task Relationships

When you enter tasks in Project and link them by clicking the Link Tasks button on the Task tab, the tasks are given a finish-to-start relationship. This is fine for many tasks, but you will most likely change some task relationships as you fine-tune a project plan.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 4) - Entering Actual Values for Tasks

A more detailed way to keep your schedule up to date is to record what actually happens for each task in your project. You can record each task’s actual start, finish, work, and duration values.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 3) - Entering a Task’s Completion Percentage

After work has begun on a task, you can quickly record its progress as a percentage. When you enter a completion percentage other than 0, Project changes the task’s actual start date to match its scheduled start date.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 2) - Tracking a Project as Scheduled

The simplest approach to tracking progress is to report that the actual work is proceeding exactly as planned. For example, if the first month of a five-month project has elapsed and all its tasks have started and finished as scheduled, you can quickly record this in the Update Project dialog box.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Tracking Progress on Tasks (part 1) - Saving a Project Baseline

After developing a project plan, one of a project manager’s most important activities is to record actuals and evaluate project performance. To judge project performance properly, it is helpful to compare it with your original plan.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Setting Up a Project Budget - Assigning Accounting Codes

Sometimes it takes more than a handful of chocolate-covered peanuts to keep the accountants happy. Project data that maps to the organization's accounting codes may be just the ticket.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Setting Up a Project Budget - Setting the Project Fiscal Year

You can set the fiscal year for a project, whether it's the one your own company uses or that of the project customer's organization. Whether the fiscal year starts in January, July, or October, a project fiscal year can make working with financial accounting departments much simpler.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Setting Up a Project Budget - Reducing Project Costs

This section discusses each of these cost-cutting techniques. However, if these methods aren't enough to solve your budget crisis, it's time to take a hard look at the budget itself and propose a change to the project budget, scope, or schedule.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Comparing Costs to Your Budget (part 3) - Associate Resources with Their Budget Type, Compare Budget Resource Values

Creating budget resources and entering target budget amounts for them in the project summary task is all well and good, but it's only one side of the equation. You must also set up the other side: the resource costs you want to compare against the budget.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Comparing Costs to Your Budget (part 2) - Enter Budget Cost and Work Values

With budget resources assigned to the project summary task, you're finally ready to add budget cost amounts for cost resources, budget work amounts for work resources, and the total number of units for material resources.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Comparing Costs to Your Budget (part 1) - Create and Designate Budget Resources, Assign Budget Resources to the Project Summary Task

Creating budget resources is the first step in the budget resource process. Your budget resources should correspond with the budget line items you want to track in your project, for example line items that the accounting department uses.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 : Integration with Microsoft Office - Exporting data to Microsoft Project

Probably, everybody knows that new Dynamics AX 2009 supports two-way synchronization with Microsoft Project Server. Sounds good, but in reality it takes a lot of effort to install and configure all the required components.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Defining Project Resources - Using the Task Form View to Add Additional Resources

One of the most popular views for assigning resources is the Gantt Chart view with the Task Form view in the bottom pane. You can also add resources in that view by using the resource details in the lower pane.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Defining Project Resources - Defining Resource Costs

There are three cost measures you can associate with a resource. The Standard Rate is used for work completed during normal working hours. The Overtime Rate is used for work completed during overtime hours.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Using the Resource Fields to Define Resource Details (part 3) - Specifying the Resource Working Time

You can edit a resource calendar from the Change Working Time dialog box, although you cannot change the name of the base calendar the resource calendar is linked to from there. Select the Project tab, Change Working Time to display the Change Working Time dialog box, and then use the drop-down list in the For box to select the resource name.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Using the Resource Fields to Define Resource Details (part 2) - Using the Max Units and Resource Availability Table to Specify Resource Availability

Use the Max Units field to enter the maximum number of units that can currently be assigned to tasks at any one time. Project uses the Max Units field to determine when the resource is overallocated (when more units of the resource have been assigned than are available) and when leveling resources.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Using the Resource Fields to Define Resource Details (part 1) - Using the Group Field to Categorize Resources

For example, you could identify all packing materials, such as boxes, tape, wrapping paper, and so on, by entering Packing Materials, all moving personnel by entering Movers, or all pieces of equipment by entering Equipment.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Defining Resource Information Using the Resource Information Dialog Box

The Resource Information dialog box contains almost all of the imperative resource definition fields, including several important resource fields that are not available on the Resource Sheet view or the Resource Form view .

Microsoft Project 2010 : Using the Resource Sheet View

One of the most effective and commonly used views for manually entering basic resource information is the Resource Sheet view. The Resource Sheet enables you to see many resources on the screen at once.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Understanding How Project Uses Resources and Costs

Resources are the people, facilities, materials, and equipment that are assigned to work on a task of a project. Although it is possible to create a schedule in Microsoft Project without assigning resources to the tasks, it is not recommended.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Setting Up a Project Budget - Reviewing Cost Information

In this section, you'll learn how to review total planned costs for all project tasks. By extension, you get a handy forecast of your overall project costs. You'll also learn how to review planned costs for tasks, resources, and assignments, so you can analyze costs at the level of granularity you need.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Setting Up a Project Budget - Preparing for Cost Calculations

In this section, you'll learn about the importance of entering accurate costs for labor and materials. You'll also learn how to assign cost resources to tasks and how to specify the costs for those assignments. Finally, you'll learn how to enter a miscellaneous cost for a task if needed.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Putting a Price Tag on Your Project & Incorporating Resource Costs

Resource costs are often the lion's share of project cost. They include the human resources and equipment that perform project tasks (work resources), as well as the consumable materials and supplies used while carrying out a task (material resources).

Microsoft Project 2010 : Saving a Set of Columns as a Table

The set of columns within a view is called a table. For views that contain tables, you can choose from a list of tables to determine what data is displayed.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Adding and Removing Columns in a View

It’s important to remember that behind the shiny interface of Project 2010, there’s a database. A nice, stable, giant database. When you use Project to add information about your project, that information makes its way into that database.

Customizing Microsoft Project 2010 : Creating Custom Fields

Custom fields can be used to add information to your project that isn’t captured using the default fields that come with Project 2010.

Microsoft Project 2010 : Sharing Data with Others

The timeline is new to Project 2010 and provides a highly visual way to share project information. After setting the timeline up with the information you want to share, you can easily copy it for pasting in another application.