Making Microsoft Project Work for You

What You Will Cover

The essentials of project management

• -The components that make up a project
• -The differences among the various versions of Microsoft Project
• -Use the ribbon interface and quickly customize it to best fit your needs
• -Use the File tab (Backstage) to manage your project files

Planning the project

• -Top-down summary tasks to use to start entering information even if you don't know the exact start or end dates
• -How to manually enter, reorder and relate or link tasks and organize them into phases
• -The types of additional information fields that can be added to your project
• -How you can create custom information fields -How to add documents to your project
• -Change the mode between manual and automatic and how it will affect your task schedule

Creating and managing deadlines, constraints and task calendars

• -The ins and outs of using deadlines, constraints and task calendars
• -How to add and modify deadlines and constraints to your project tasks
• -How and why you might want to mark a task as inactive
• -How to create and modify task calendars
• -The right way to identify critical tasks

Assigning resources—people, equipment and materials

• A quick way to modify the working times for your resources
• How to manually add resources to your project and assign them to tasks
• The right way to enter resource costs for workers, equipment and materials
• What to do when you need to edit or add information for your resources project

Tracking and managing your project

• Different ways to track the progress of each task
• How to accurately use the status date when updating project tasks
• Discover what each status indicator means and how to use them to get a quick view of your overall project status
• How to apply filters to zero in on only those tasks that are necessary to monitor

Views and reports

• How to group, filter and sort data
• An easy way to see more of your project information
• Compare the actual progress of your project against the baseline
• Use the Timeline view to get a concise look at your overall schedule
• How to use the built-in reports and how to quickly create custom reports from your project data
• What a critical path is and how to view your project's path to make sure you're on track

Integrating Project with other Office applications

• Import data from a Microsoft Excel® spreadsheet
• Use the enhanced copy and paste to move content to and from Office applications and keep its formatting, outline levels and column headers
• How to export your project data to a variety of file types including spreadsheets, database tables,text files and more

Working with multiple projects

• Why you might want to break down a large project into a master project with subprojects, and how to accomplish it
• Take advantage of Microsoft Project's backwards compatibility to manage multiple projects
• An easy way to view your subproject statistics without having to sift through the entire project status report
• Quickly view the critical path of multiple projects and make sure they're all on the right track