Important
The ability to inactivate tasks is available only in Project
Professional and not in Project Standard. If you have Project
Standard, skip this section.
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. You might for
example develop tasks that pose “what-if” questions that you can’t
begin to answer until preliminary questions get answered. Or you could
design a project plan that describes a likely-case scenario for
completion but also includes more optimistic and pessimistic sets of
tasks as well.
In Project, you can inactivate a single task or multiple tasks.
Inactivating tasks may be preferable to deleting tasks, in that it
keeps the task information in the project plan but removes the
scheduling effect of those tasks. A task that drives the start of a
successor task, for example, remains visible when inactivated, but it
has strikethrough formatting applied in the Gantt Chart and other views, and its link
relationship is broken and its successor is rescheduled.
Should you later wish to reactivate inactivated tasks, you can
easily do so, and Project restores them as active tasks with the same
scheduling impact as they previously had.
In this exercise, you inactivate a summary task and its
subtasks.
-
Select the name of task 39, Design book’s
companion website.
This summary task and its subtasks reflect an initial plan
to account for the work of designing a Web site that would promote
the new book at its launch. You still think you might want to
include this work in the new book plan, but for now, you’d like to
inactivate these tasks.
-
On the Task tab, in the
Schedule group, click Inactivate.
Project inactivates the summary task and its
subtasks.
The original task information is still visible, but now it
has no impact on the overall project plan. Later, should you
decide to include these tasks in the project plan, you could
reactivate them by clicking Inactivate again.
Clean Up
Close the Advanced Tasks B file.
