Learn Microsoft Project 2013.pdf

Learn Project 2013

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction

Acquiring Project 2013; Exercise Files ...................................................................7

Whats New in Project 2013 ..................................................................................13

Chapter 2 Help

Online, Offline and Contextual Help .....................................................................15

Chapter 3 Project 2013 Workspace

Start Screen, Project Workspace and Backstage View ..........................................19

Chapter4 Using Touch

Overview of Principles and Touch Gestures .........................................................25

Chapter 5 The Ribbon and Toolbars

The Ribbon.............................................................................................................28

Quick Access Toolbar ............................................................................................33

Mini Toolbar ..........................................................................................................35

Contextual Menu ....................................................................................................37

Status Bar ...............................................................................................................39

Chapter 6 Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard Shortcuts and Key Tips .........................................................................41

Chapter 7 Project Options

Customize Settings and the Use of Project 2013 ...................................................44

Chapter 8 Tasks Basics

Setting Up Tasks ....................................................................................................50

Project Information ................................................................................................55

Project Options, Entry Bar, Timeline, Properties ..................................................58

Chapter 9 Dependency Basics

Link/Unlink Tasks; Setting Up Dependencies between Tasks ..............................62

Chapter 10 Resource Basics

Resource Sheet View .............................................................................................66

Resource Assignment.............................................................................................70

Chapter 11 Opening, Closing and Saving

Opening and Closing Projects; Switching Windows; Pinning to Recent List .......73

Saving Projects; File Formats; AutoSave ..............................................................76

Chapter 12 Calendars

Creating New Calendar; Setting Up Working Time; Recurrence .........................80

Standard Calendar; Schedule Public Holidays; Adding Exceptions......................85

Chapter 13 Views and Tables

Task Views; Zoom; Timescale ..............................................................................88

Resource Views and Split View ............................................................................92

Tables, Columns and Fields ...................................................................................97

Timeline View .....................................................................................................102

Chapter 14 Summary Tasks

Inserting Tasks; Subtasks .....................................................................................105

Chapter 15 Scheduling

Scheduling............................................................................................................110

Chapter 16 Leveling

Basics of Leveling................................................................................................115

Leveling Order; Resolving Resource Overallocations ........................................119

Chapter 17 Critical Path and Milestones

Critical Tasks; Slack; Critical Filter ....................................................................123

Milestones; Milestone Filter ................................................................................127

Chapter 18 Notes

Adding Notes to a Task and Resource .................................................................129

Chapter 19 Tasks Types and Effort Driven

Fixed Task, Duration and Units ...........................................................................132

Chapter 20 More about Resources

Resource Types ....................................................................................................138

More about Resource Assignments .....................................................................141

Chapter 21 Constrains and Deadlines

Constraints and Deadlines....................................................................................146

Chapter 22 More about Dependencies

Types of Dependencies; Lag and Lead ................................................................151

Chapter 23 Resolving Scheduling Issues

Respect Links; Task Inspector; Resource Overallocations ..................................156

Chapter 24 Costs

Assigning Costs to Resources ..............................................................................161

Project Costs ........................................................................................................165

Chapter 25 Project Outline

Showing, Hiding and Moving Subtasks...............................................................169

Chapter 26 Baselines and Interim Plans

Purpose of Interim Plan; Setting, Saving and Clearing a Baseline ......................172

Chapter 27 Tracking

Progress Update ...................................................................................................177

Tools for Tracking Progress.................................................................................182

Project Options that Affect Progress Tracking ....................................................185

Tracing Task Paths ...............................................................................................191

Chapter 28 Reporting

Customizing Reports ............................................................................................193

Types of Report; Creating a New Report ............................................................198

Earned Value Reporting .......................................................................................203

Chapter 29 Printing

Print Properties and Settings; Header and Footer ................................................208

Chapter 30 Gantt Chart

Gantt Chart Wizard; Formatting a Gantt Chart ....................................................213

Chapter 31 Import and Export, Organizer, and SkyDrive

Import/Export to/from an Excel Workbook .........................................................217

Organize Global Template ...................................................................................222

Storing Project Files on SkyDrive .......................................................................224

Chapter 32 Security

Password Protect; Read-only; Trust Center .........................................................227

Chapter 33 Conclusion

Recent Development of Project; Close ................................................................230

Project 2013

Copyright 2008-2013 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Video: Acquiring Project 2013; Exercise Files

Toby: Hello and welcome to our course on Microsoft Project 2013, the award winning project

management software for your desktop. My name is Toby and Im going to be your instructor

on this course.

Let me talk first about who this course is for. I hope that anybody who wants to learn how to use

Microsoft Project 2013 will get a lot out of this course. But when I was planning the course, I

had three particular groups of people in mind. First of all, those people whove never used

project management software before. One word of warning for everybody including that first

group though, I am going to assume that youre familiar with the basic language of projects and

basic principles like a schedule. You may even be familiar with terms such as critical path,

resources and overallocation. Now even if you are familiar with these terms, Ill need to explain

them with particular reference to Microsoft Project as we work through the course. But if you

know nothing about project management at all, you may find some aspects of this course a bit of

a struggle and it would be a good idea to get some background reading in first on project

management in general.

The second group of people are people whove used a very old version of Microsoft Project, a

version before the Ribbon was introduced. Microsoft Project has changed a lot in the two or

three versions. Although some of the fundamental principles are exactly the same as they were

15 years ago, some principles have changed a bit and there are many, many new editions to what

you can do and the tools that are available in Microsoft Project.

The third group of people are the people who have used one of the more recent versions of

Project and for them Ill be focusing on the specific changes in this version. Not only are there

some changes to the aspects of the interface such as the Ribbon, but there are some functional

changes as well.

Now let me talk about the structure of the course. Ive arranged the course into a number of

units which are in turn grouped into chapters, and I believe that this forms a logical sequence for

learning Project pretty much from scratch. If youve used Microsoft Project before, particularly

Project 2013


a recent version, you may feel that you can skip some of these sections or go through them

quickly. Thats entirely your choice. I would warn you that even things that you may think

youre familiar with; fairly basic things like using online Help or using the Ribbon have changed

in this version. However if youre happy that you can cope with minor changes or you can check

the online Help yourself for these kinds of change, then its entirely your choice whether you

want to skip forward so that you get into the nitty-gritty of scheduling projects and using

Microsoft Project more quickly. If youre starting from scratch I suggest that you dont skip the

early sections even if they appear to be on topics that youre quite familiar with because the way

that Microsoft Project works is subtly different in many cases from other desktop products, and

its worth knowing some of the tools and tricks of the trade which will help you much later on

when we get into the more advanced use of Microsoft Project.

Another important point to bear in mind with this course is that we do not cover the Server

products associated with Microsoft Project. I will mention one or two features of them from

time to time but theyre not covered in any level of detail on this course, and also that were not

covering the programming of Microsoft Project on this course, the use of Project VBA. We are

primarily only looking at the desktop project management product itself and there is plenty to

learn in a course like this one on that basic desktop Project to get you really started and to build

you up to a really good level of skill in Microsoft Project.

And talking about those desktop Project products, there are basically two of them. There is a

Project Standard and a Project Professional. Now there are quite a lot of differences in them

when you look at the Server side of things. But fundamentally, virtually everything on this

course can be done using Project Standard. Im actually going to be using Project Professional

on the course and I will point out the one or two things you can do in Project Professional that

you cant do in Project Standard, but there really are only one or two of them that affect this

course. If you have Project Standard thats absolutely not a problem, youre going to be able to

do this course absolutely fine with Project Standard.

Now as part of this course you should have a whole set of exercise files. The file names will be

similar to these. There will be about this many with about these names. The actual list may

vary. It does change a little over time. But make sure you know where those files are. They

should be available on your device. And from time to time I will be referring to these and Ill be

Project 2013


asking you to make your own versions of these or to use the versions youre provided with. So

make sure you know where that set of files is kept.

Now in Project 2013, Microsoft has tried to make the product usable with a touch screen. Now

to be fair, there were certain things were able to do in the previous version associated with

Project 2010 where you could use a touch screen for certain things. But to have general usage of

a product like this with touch really, Project 2013 is the first version. Im going to incorporate

coverage of some of the gestures and techniques to use with a touch screen while Im going

through the course but it would be an extremely tedious job if I did everything on the course

twice, once with keyboard and mouse and once with touch screen. So Im really going to use

touch screen from time to time, explain what Ive done, go through the main gestures, and try to

use touch in a number of places as an example. But there really isnt time to do everything twice

and I think both people that are using touch and those who dont use touch would be equally

frustrated if I did do everything twice. Having said that, the PC that I am recording this course

on is a touch screen PC. Im also using hand gestures in front of the screen, but for a course that

youre going to follow on screen, me using hand gestures in front of the screen isnt really going

to work. So I am only going to cover mouse mode as Ill call it as one option and touch mode as

the other during the course. But if youve got a touch screen device, I think that youre going to

find that you can do just about everything in Microsoft Project that you need to. Although I

would warn you that in some cases the accuracy of touch can be an issue and to some extent if

youve got nice thin fingers youre better off than somebody like me who has rather fat fingers

Im afraid.

The next thing to mention is that I am running Project 2013 here on Windows 8. If youre using

Windows 7, there will be some differences; not an awful lot, but you will notice one or two

differences in places. Ill try to point those out as we go along because I am also testing what Im

doing on Windows 7 as well. And something thats equally important is that the resolution on

which Im recording this is a 4:3 aspect ratio resolution. Its not widescreen. You may well

have one of the widescreen resolutions on your device. Also depending on the resolution of your

device, you may see different amounts of things on the screen. This can be extreme as things

like seeing different content on the Ribbon.

Project 2013


Im currently looking at the start screen for Project Professional 2013. If you are able to see that

start screen, and Ill talk about that in just a moment, you may look at yours and you may look at

mine and you may think, well, they look completely different. Well, there can be substantial

difference partly because of the screen resolution and partly because of themes, windows,

backgrounds, and so on. Some of which were going to talk about during the course. But as long

as you can see something on the left that says Project and list that says Recent and an Open other

projects thing there, and then these boxes in the middle or some variant on these boxes in the

middle then Im sure youll be fine. And the ways in which these things are different I will

explain as we go through the early stages of the course.

Now I mentioned just now that Id talk about seeing this start screen. If you already have

Microsoft Project 2013 installed, either the Standard version of the Professional version and you

can start it up either from one of the tiles on the start screen or Windows 8 or from the start menu

on Windows 7 and you can actually see this screen, then you can actually finish following this

section because the rest of this section is going to be devoted to those people who havent got

Project 2013 installed. Im not actually going to show you how to install it, but I am going to

talk about how to get hold of a copy of it and point you in the right direction in terms of where to

get the instructions to install it. But if its already installed and running on your machine, you

can move on to the next section now; if not, read on.

So for the rest of this section Im talking to those of you who maybe dont have yet Project

installed. And the first place Im going to direct you is to part of microsoft.com, to this

particular page. Now given that I may well have recorded this course some time before you

watch it, the page itself may have changed. But one things for certain, Microsoft will still have

an equivalent page there. Youre looking for the requirements for Project Professional 2013.

You may well need to do a search, either a Google or a search within microsoft.com to find it but

youll find a page that gives you those system requirements. Now the system requirements from

point of view of Project come into approximately two categories. One of them is the hardware

requirements. You need a device that satisfies this minimum hardware specification. You can

sometimes make Project work on lower specked devices but it almost invariably leads to a

headache and this isnt a particularly high specification for modern devices anyway. So make

sure youve got a device that satisfies that hardware requirement.

Project 2013


And then the other key requirement is the operating system requirement. And as far as desktop

operating systems are concerned, you need Windows 7 or Windows 8. If you have XP, if you

have Vista, then Im afraid thats no good. Youre going to have to upgrade your desktop

operating system in order to run Microsoft Project on your desktop.

Now there are some other requirements here. There are requirements for graphics including a

minimum screen resolution. There are list of supported browsers and also some details of the

touch requirements if you intend to use touch with Project 2013. So you need to take note of

those as well.

So once youve established that the device youre planning to use will be able to run Project, the

next question is how to get yourself a copy of Project. Now, of course, you can buy a copy. You

could buy it from Microsoft. You could use your favorite online store; maybe your local

computer store will have Project Professional or Project Standard in stock. But the good news is

at the time of recording this it is possible to get a trial version of Microsoft Project Professional

from Microsoft. Now the particular offer and the terms of the offer do tend to vary but at the

time of recording, you could get a 60-day free trial from Microsoft and that includes a guided

element where it will actually give you some supporting help and information throughout the 60-

day trial which I think you might find very useful. And depending on how much time you have

available, you may well find that a 60 trial is plenty of time to work your way through this course

and to make sure that youre comfortable about buying Project, if indeed thats what you intend

to do. Theres a page there which gives you access today to the Project Professional 2013 60-

day trial. You may, well, need to do another Google or you may need to do a search within

microsoft.com at some future date if this actual page isnt here. But if there is a Project trial

version available, you should be able to find it without too much trouble.

One other thing to be aware of is that there are both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Microsoft

Project available. Now you would generally be best advised to install the 64-bit version if youre

device will support it, but one or two things to warn you about. One of them is that if you have

Microsoft Office 2013 32-bit installed, I believe youll have trouble installing Microsoft Project

64-bit. And also if you do try to install the 64-bit version, there are one or two other scenarios

where you can run into trouble. Having said that, Im not going to try and list what will and

wont work here. Thats somewhat outside the scope of what I do. Ill leave that between you

Project 2013


and Microsoft. But if you download a trial version, youre given the option of either 32 or 64. If

you download the 64-bit version, try to install that and if it doesnt work, Im afraid youll have

to download the 32-bit. If you have a bought version and normally with bought versions they

include both. So if you try 64 and if it doesnt work, then try the 32. In terms of the

functionality what you can do with them theyre the same. The only real significant difference is

in the performance. This course is actually being run with a 32-bit version of Project

Professional 2013 running on Windows 8.

So when you have acquired your copy of Project 2013, you have installed it and preferably you

have activated it as well, you will finish up able to start it from the start screen in Windows 8 or

the start menu in Windows 7 and you will get to the point that we saw earlier on where you have

the start screen. And this is our starting point for using Microsoft Project 2013. But just before

we open it up and start to use it, Id like to just spend a little bit of time talking whats new in

Project 2013, particularly for the benefit of those whove used Project before, and thats what

were going to cover in the next section so please join me for that.

Project 2013


Video: Whats New in Project 2013

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, Im going to do a quick run

through of whats new in Project 2013. Even if you havent used Project before, I think youre

going to find this section useful because it will introduce you to some of the key points that well

be covering in the course.

The best source of information for whats new in Project 2013 from a fairly non-technical point

of view is within the Office section on microsoft.com and theres a page there called Whats

New in Project 2013 and I want to go through the main points on that page in this section.

One of the sections on that page is headed Get Started Quickly and this really describes the main

features of the start screen in Project 2013, the screen we saw earlier. And from this screen you

get links not only to creating a new blank project but you can get links to Project templates that

were going to look at later on and then various other links to facilities to import information

from Microsoft Excel or from SharePoint. Well be looking at the start screen in more detail

later on.

One of the main areas of extension and improvement in Project 2013 is in the range of reports

that are available. There are some new and greatly improved graphical reports and there are also

new types of reports such as burn down reports. You can also use Link 2010 or later to

communicate with members of your team by instant message, video chat, email, or even a phone

call. If you were dealing with a complex project and youre having trouble sorting out some

issues with a specific task or around the area of a specific task, you can look at the task path for

the selected task which shows all of the predecessor tasks and all of the successor tasks

conveniently colored to help to identify them.

And then there are some other new or improved features here. The first of these, Take projects

into the far future, means that we can now schedule projects with project dates up to the middle

of the 22nd

century which is probably far enough ahead for most of us. And then other new

features include the sharing of meetings if you export your project reports, timelines, or other

project data into other Office programs you can share those online on any supported device. You

can save and share project files in the Cloud as with the other components of Office 2013. And

Project 2013


if you use Project online, you have access to a full version of Project from almost anywhere and

you can run it even on PCs that dont have Project 2013 installed.

Well be looking at most of these new features during the course. But in the mean time, I

suggest that you look at this page, Whats New in Project 2013 and maybe follow some of the

links on that page to describe some of the features in more detail.

Thats it for this section. Ill see you in the next one.

Project 2013


Chapter 2 Help

Video: Online, Offline and Contextual Help

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, were

going to look at Help.

As with most major new software products nowadays, there is very limited help actually

provided with Project and the bulk of the help is provided online. Therefore in order to take

advantage of the full Help facilities of Project 2013, you will need an internet connection. I do

have a live internet connection.

And one of the great advantages of Project 2013 in terms of Help is that access to Help is

provided in a very consistent way. Generally speaking, in the top right hand corner of any

window, you will see a little question mark and if I hover over the question mark on the start

screen window, here youll see that the word Help is shown. Thats called a screen tip. And

then after Help in brackets it says F1 and that is the keyboard shortcut for Help. Basically, there

are the two standard ways of getting help in Project. Either click on this question mark or use the

keyboard shortcut F1. If you click on the question mark or use the keyboard shortcut, you open

browser based Help.

Now unfortunately at the time of recording this course there was alignment problems with this

Help Home page. It wont actually stop me covering the material on the page but it does look a

little bit strange. But I think when I explain it to you it wont really cause you a problem.

The Help home page really contains four main sections. Up here you have a set of buttons which

Ill talk about in a moment and then a search box that you can use to search the online Help for a

particular feature. You then have three other sections. You have a Popular searches section

which basically gives you the terms that are the most popular for people to search on in Help.

Ill come back to the Search and those popular searches a little bit later on.

The third section is a Getting Started section and that gives links to three main getting started

sections within the Project 2013 Help. Theres Whats new with Project 2013. Note that as I

hover the mouse over that term, its underlined and becomes a live hyperlink. Then it has

Project keyboard shortcuts. Were going to be talking about the keyboard shortcuts a little bit

Project 2013


later on. And then it says, Make the switch to Project 2013. If I click on that one, Make the

switch to Project 2013, it gives access to a page within microsoft.com where you can download a

number of relatively short videos that give you some information which is particularly useful if

youre switching from another version of Project. So apart from giving a summary of the new

features, it explains things like a tour of the Ribbon and where all your favorite buttons and menu

items are in Project 2013. So if youre new to Project or youve used an older version and youd

like a different view on the changes, there are some good videos here for you to download and

take a look at.

And when youve finished looking at those, then you just close this browser and youll be back

to the Project Help home page again.

Now the fourth section on the Project Help home page is also a set of links, Basic tasks in

Project, Change working days for the Project calendar, and so on. If I followed one of those, say

Set a baseline, that takes you through to the relevant page within the Help system.

If you find that the text is a little bit too small to read, then one of the buttons in the group up

here to the left of the Search box, that one, says Use large text. If you click on that button, it

increases the size of the text and makes it much easier to read. You can then decrease it again by

clicking on the button and its back to its standard size. While were looking at these buttons,

another point to make here is that to the left of that button there is a Print button which will

enable you to print a particular page or a section of some pages on Help.

Now sometimes when youre looking at some help, there will be a further link within the help

such as this one here. As I hover over it, youll see that it becomes highlighted, usually with an

underline. Click on that and that will take me through to another page and from there, there may

be further links.

This is browser based so at any stage if I want to go back to the previous page, I use the Back

button amongst the group of buttons in the top left there. And if I want to go forward again to a

page Ive just left, I can use the Forward button. And then the middle button in that group at any

time if I want to go home back to Help Home, I just click on the picture of the home there and

that takes me back to the Help home page.

Project 2013


And then just one other thing on this page and thats the Search box itself. I mentioned the

popular searches before but in fact you can search on pretty much any term that you might have a

question or an issue about in relation to Project 2013. Click in the Search box and type in a term.

So for instance, if I wanted to find out about leveling type it in and then the magnifying glass on

the right is the button, the command button that says Search online Help, click on that. Now the

links that I can see here are a bit of a mix really. Some of them just help me to find things say on

the Ribbon, but others actually link through to articles. The very first link there is to an article,

Level resource assignment. So if I click on that itll take me through to an article that tells me

quite a lot about how to level the resources on a project. If youve got no idea what leveling is,

you will find out what it is a little bit later on in the course. And again, I can follow through

links and at any time I can jump back to the home page and get some more help.

When youve finished using Help, you can either minimize it down on to your task bar if you

anticipate using it again or if you look at the top right hand corner of the window there, there is

an X for the Close button.

I mentioned before that if you dont have a live internet connection, then you wont be able to

get online help. If you dont have an internet connection and you click on Help, you get the

offline help. Let me just show you what you get with offline help. Ill click on the question

mark there again. I get a cant connect message here. Were having trouble connecting to

office.com in my case. You may or may not get that message. You may or may not be asked to

try again. Im not going to try again because I want to show you what happens with offline help.

And basically with offline help, all you get is help about where things are on the Ribbon. So if I

type in here Leveling and then ask for help on leveling, what I get is information about leveling

commands and where they appear on the Ribbon, and thats just about the extent of offline help.

So its not really going to be able to help you very much. But in summary if you need the full

help that comes with Project 2013, youre going to need a live internet connection.

The last thing Id like to talk to you about in relation to Help now is whats called contextual

help. Ive actually leapt into Project 2013 here just for a moment and Ive opened one of the

dialogs. It doesnt really matter what this dialog is about, what it does. Youll find out about it

later on. But youll quite often see in some of the dialogs that we come across a Help button and

in theory what happens if its got a Help button like this in a dialog is it will take you into the

Project 2013


same Help system that weve just seen but it will take you to a particular topic related to this

dialog. So if we were formatting bar styles for a Gantt Chart in Project 2013 and clicked on

Help, we would normally expect to get into the Help system with some help about bar styles.

Now in my experience of Project 2013 so far, a lot of the time when you click these Help buttons

all it does is take you to the Help home page. So if I click Help here, it actually just takes me to

the regular home page and of course I can then do a search. I could search in there for bar styles

and get some help. So in theory, there is what we call contextual help, which is help that directly

relates to the context in which we asked for the help. In practice, Im not sure at this stage with

Project 2013 that much of the contextual help is actually very contextual. But having said that, if

you get into the Help system, you can search for the particular topic you want help for and if

there is help on it, you will be able to find it.

So thats almost it on Help. Let me just close this down again. For the benefit of those of you

who are using touch, of course wherever Ive clicked for these things, you tap. So if I tap on that

Help button in that dialog, it does exactly the same thing.

Thats it on Help in Project 2013. Ill see you in the next section.

Project 2013


Chapter 3 Project 2013 Workspace

Video: Start Screen, Project Workspace and Backstage View

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, were

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 Ive already mentioned this start screen and there is an option as

well 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. Its a pretty useful way of starting up Project in my opinion. But that may not suit you

and as well see later when we look at Project Options, theres a lot of customization thats

possible with the Project workspace. When youve been using Project for a little while, then its

worth taking a little bit of time just to make sure that youve got it customized to your particular

preferences and requirements.

Now on this start screen, weve got an area on the left that lists the recent projects that weve

worked on. We havent worked on any projects yet so that area is empty. Theres 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.

Theres the Help button that weve already talked about and then the normal Windows buttons.

So theres a minimize there. And because Im in normal view, theres a maximize button and, of

course, a close button. And with each of these theres 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

Project 2013


account that you are currently running Project 2013 under, and the account that Im 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, Ill assume that you have a Microsoft account that you are running this under and

that its shown there and you can see mine in the top right hand corner of the start screen.

Now lets look at these big buttons on the start screen. The one thats highlighted at the moment

is blank project and youll use that a lot when you start a new project from scratch. So youre

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 theres 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,

thats 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 thats the basic idea

behind templates that Im 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 thats somewhat outside the scope of this course but Im 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

youve used Microsoft SharePoint, youll 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. Im

not going to go through that now. Its a good one for you to try, particularly if youve never used

Project before. But it is very basic and everything thats in it were going to be covering during

Project 2013


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. Theyre sort of model projects. They dont have any

specifics in them. They dont 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 theres a new product launch.

Thats 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 theres some suggested searches here, business, construction, marketing

products, but youre certainly not restricted to those. The main example were going to use on

this course is a construction project so Im going to type in here Construction. I could in fact just

click on that link if I wanted to but Im 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. Lets 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, theres a construction proposal. There is a home construction budget. Thatll 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 thats a pretty useful facility whereby you

can search microsoft.com that way to help you with your particular requirement for creating a

project. Now youve 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.

Project 2013


Now I should just point out to those of you who are using touch that we havent done anything

unusual here. Im going to come to touch in more detail in a couple of sections time. But all

were 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, lets create a blank project. Either click on

Blank project or tap if youre 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. Youre going to see that quite a bit and well 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 Im 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 well look at the details as we go through the

course.

So lets start right at the top of the workspace here and in the top left we have something called

the Quick Access Toolbar and Im going to look at that in detail a little bit later on, but basically

its 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 weve 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, thats 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 theres nothing

shown in the timeline. There is a start date which is today. Im doing this on Monday, March

Project 2013


the 18th

and theres a finish date which is the same day because, again, I havent 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. Youll probably use Gantt Charts quite a bit with

Microsoft Project. And as youll see in a short while what the Gantt Chart normally consists of

is two parts. On the left you have whats 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 were going to look at a sample project shortly

and then when we do Ill 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

isnt an awful lot of interesting information to show so theres not a lot shown there. But well

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,

well be coming back to that a little bit later on as well.

So weve got the Ribbon, weve got the timeline, weve 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 theres 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 arent actually in the individual projects

themselves. So its 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 well 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 youre running Project under. I mentioned that

earlier on in the course. Now Backstage View were going to look at piece by piece as we go

Project 2013


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 were 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 thats it on the Project workspace for now. There are quite a few more things but well cover

those as we go through the course. Thats the end of this section. Ill see you in the next one.

Project 2013


Chapter 4 Using Touch

Video: Overview of Principles and Touch Gestures

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. Im going to look at touch in this short

section. If youre not intending to use touch and maybe not even interested in using touch or

how people use it, then you can pretty much skip this section. If you are going to use touch or if

youre considering using touch, then its quite a short section and I think its very useful to go

through it with me.

The first thing Id like to point out to you is this blog post on office.com, Using the new Office

with touch. You can find that by Googling it or by going to microsoft.com and searching. But it

is an extremely good post which basically gives the background to how Microsoft went about

addressing touch in Office 2013 in general. From the point of view of touch, Project is part of

Office 2013. So virtually everything that you see in this blog post is relevant to Project.

Now Im not going to go through all the detail here. Its a really interesting document to read. It

not only gives the background as to why they did things the way that they did but it also goes

into some detail of the particular requirements of different aspects of using a fairly advanced

piece of software with a touch device. They recognized in particular that one of the key issues

with using a touch device, as well see during this course, is the accuracy of touching part of the

screen. Particularly, if youve got fairly fat fingers like mine in comparison with accessing

maybe just a single point on a screen using a mouse.

Now if you go through this article, it gives background to the vision for touch by Microsoft, the

sort of guidelines they followed and then some particular issues like targeting which is really the

targeting a specific point on the screen. And then things like the changes they made to the

Ribbon. Now were going to look at the use of the Ribbon with touch in the next section so I

wont go into that here. And then further down they talk about other user interface elements. A

good example is the color picker. Thats not particularly relevant to Project, although you do use

it in a couple of situations in Project. But again the general principle is to take the conventional

color picker and just make everything bigger to be easier to operate with your fingers. Anyway

its an extremely interesting and informative article and I do recommend that you go through,

take the time to just read through it. I will be referring to it from time to time and many of the

Project 2013


points that it makes later on in the course and in many ways it forms the background to many

aspects of touch in Project 2013.

And the other important article which is also on microsoft.com is the Office Touch Guide. Now

you may have seen this in an earlier version where it was basically a text document. The version

thats available as Im recording this course has got some little video demonstrations of some

aspects of using touch. Now again, Im not going to go through all of these now because the

ones that are particularly relevant Im going to go through at the various points in the course.

But lets just take the first example, Zoom in and out. If I click on zoom in and out, you get a

little demonstration of using stretch and pinch. Watch again. The idea is if you want to zoom

into something, you stretch. If you want to zoom out you pinch. So zooming in by stretching

your fingers apart gets you closer to the subject, and then zooming out by pinching gets you

farther away. Now for each of the different kind of gesture with touch, theres a little video

demonstration in this article, Office Touch Guide. So scroll. So, theres a demonstration there of

how to scroll through a document on screen. Ill just play that again. Notice how the user is

basically touching the screen, you see a little sort of flash as they touch the screen, and then they

hold it as they scroll through the document.

Now if you are intending to use touch I suggest you locate this document and work through all of

the different gestures; basic gestures, gestures with shapes and objects. Again, not particularly

relevant to Project 2013 many of these, but some of them are. And then further down

particularly text, selecting text and formatting text, we will be looking at using touch later on.

And then there are some specifics related to Excel and PowerPoint. There are none specifically

in relation to Project but many of the earlier ones are relevant.

Now I am going to be demonstrating touch at various points on the course and as I introduce

each new gesture, Ill go through an example. Unfortunately, its not practical on a course like

this to do everything using both touch and the mouse and keyboard. It would mean doing

everything twice which would get a little bit tedious for everybody, including me. So Im

primarily going to use mouse and keyboard on the course, and Ill introduce touch as various

points. Ill use examples with touch, but primarily itll be mouse and keyboard. And if you are

using a touch device, I suggest that you practice using that right from the outset and you will find

that virtually everything in Project is perfectly possible using touch. And in my experience so

Project 2013


far, if youre using touch with Project 2013, really the only area where I still have a little bit of

difficulty is when I need to target something very precisely. In some situations, that is still quite

difficult but maybe with a bit more practice Ill get over that as well.


Project 2013


Chapter 5 The Ribbon and Toolbars

Video: The Ribbon

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, were going to look at the

Ribbon. So were going to start with Blank Project and the Ribbon is this rectangular area that

you can see towards the top of the window. The Ribbon replaces the old menu system and in

most of the components of Office. The replacement started in Office 2007 and although theyve

progressed at different paces within the different components in Office 2013, the Ribbon is

pretty much universally now at the same stage of development. So if youve used the Ribbon in

something like Word or Excel, then in Project there wont be any great surprises. The Ribbon

actually is a rectangle with a number of symbols on it and the symbols represent different kinds

of commands, options, buttons, settings, and so on. And in the case of Project, were going to be

looking at an awful lot of those during this course.

Now you can see one set of these buttons here and the buttons on the Ribbon are divided into

groups, and in turn each of the sets of groups occupy one tab. Now the tabs are along the top

here. Theres a Task tab, a Resource tab, a Report tab, Project tab and View tab, and they are

pretty much always there when youre using Project 2013. Currently, I have the Task tab

selected. You can see that sort of rectangle around it that tells me its selected. And on the Task

tab, you have groups. Theres a View Group, a Clipboard Group, a Font Group, a Schedule

Group, and so on. And each group has a number of buttons, a number of commands in it. The

View Group here has just one thats called Gantt Chart. The Clipboard has four; the Font has

about seven or eight. Now depending on the resolution of your screen, you may see more or less

commands in these groups. You may indeed see more or less groups because what Project 2013

does is to fit as much in as it can and it will vary to some extent depending on the size of your

screen, the resolution, etc. and one or two other things that were going to look at in just a

moment. So thats the Task tab. Lets look at the Resource tab.

Click on Resource. You can see the Resource tab that has its own set of groups: View,

Assignments, Insert, Properties, Level. Report tab, Project tab, View tab, well be looking at all

of these during the course.

Project 2013


Now in addition, at the moment there is another tab, a Format tab. And you notice its got this

sort of light lilac-y colored background, Gantt Chart Tools. Some of the tabs on the Ribbon only

appear in certain circumstances and theyre called contextual tabs. Now at the moment, were

looking at a Gantt Chart. Now its actually not much of a Gantt Chart because it hasnt got

anything in it at the moment, but you can tell its supposed to be a Gantt Chart because it says

Gantt Chart down at the side here. And when were showing a Gantt Chart, we will get the

Gantt Chart Tools Format tab which again has got a different set of commands on it arranged

into groups.

Now let me just go back to the Task tab at the moment. On the left here where it says View and

it says Gantt Chart, let me just click on there and Im going to choose a different view. Im

going to choose a view called Network Diagram. Now what happens with the network diagram

selected is that I get a different view. The view wont tell me much at the moment because as I

say Ive got no tasks. But with the network diagram, I get Network Diagram Tools Format tab

that has a different set of groups and commands on it. So we have these contextual tabs and

which contextual tabs you can see at any time depend on what youre actually looking at, and to

some extent on what youre doing at the time. Now the contextual tabs well look at as we go

through the course and as I introduce different views, different types of objects and so on, I will

introduce many of these contextual tabs.

Now were back at the Task tab here and the next thing I want to point out to you is that

depending on what youre looking at and what youre doing, some of the commands on the

Ribbon may be enabled and some may not. So if you look at the Task tab at the moment, you

notice there that weve got a row of buttons there with percentages written on them that are

actually enabled. If you clicked on those, they would do something. The button right on the left,

this one that says Gantt Chart, the one we used just now to switch to a different view, Network

Diagram View and back here to Gantt Chart View, thats enabled. We can use that. But the

Paste button is not enabled. Its grayed out. You can click on it, it wont do anything. At any

one time, you would expect that some buttons are enabled and some are disabled, and as is the

convention in a Windows interface commands that are disabled are grayed out. So be aware of

the fact that the buttons that are not grayed out you can use at any time and the ones that are

grayed out you cant.

Project 2013


Now if youre using touch, then you would switch between these tabs by tapping on the names of

the tabs: Task, Resource, Report, Project, etc. And then to execute a command, you tap on the

command, maybe choose from options if there are options, but theres a very important aspect of

using touch with a Ribbon and its universal across the components of Office 2013 and that is

that there are two modes of operation. There is mouse mode which is what Im using at the

moment and there is touch mode which I want to show you next.

Now to switch into touch mode for those of you who are using touch, youre going to use this

little button here. The screen tip that pops up, Touch, stroke, Mouse Mode. You can see it there.

That is the tip that tells you this button which is actually on the Quick Access Toolbar is the one

you use to switch between the two modes. Now if you click or tap on the little arrow there to the

right of the pointing finger, you get a choice: mouse, which is the current selection, or touch.

Im going to tap on touch and I am now in touch mode. Now the important thing to note here is

that you have the same tabs and basically the same groups, although depending on the tab, the

situation and the screen resolution, etc., you may not be able to see all of the groups at every time

and the number of commands in some of the group may be reduced in touch mode because

basically what happens in touch mode is that everything is spaced out more to enable you to

operate it with your fingers. I pointed out to you just now that little sequence of buttons with

percentages marked on them. They would be incredibly difficult to use with your fingers as they

were just now, all sort of scrunched up tightly next to each other. If you look at that same row of

buttons here, you can see that in touch mode theyre spaced out widely enough that you can use

them with the tips of your fingers.

So if youre working in touch mode, you can switch to touch mode and if you want to, you can

just stay there. Im going to switch back to mouse mode now. Im actually going to switch back

using my finger tips. But Im going to switch back to mouse mode and from now on, Im going

to use mouse mode in this section. But be aware of that setting for touch.

So tap on that button again, tap on mouse, and Im back into mouse mode again.

One of the problems with using the Ribbon is that it does use up rather a lot of space on the

screen and sometimes when youre dealing with a large complex project, you may say I wish the

Ribbon was a bit smaller or I could just get it out of the way to give myself a bit more space to

Project 2013


work with. Well, there is a way of doing that. You may not want to use this approach early on

in your use of Project 2013 but when youve been using it for a while, this will very probably be

something that you like to do. If you look towards the right hand end of the Ribbon, theres a

little up pointing arrow there and the screen tip that comes up is Collapse the Ribbon. And if you

want to collapse the Ribbon, basically you click that and the Ribbon is now out of your way and

youve got a lot more space to work in. Now you may see that the most obvious disadvantage of

doing that is you no longer have access to the commands that you need to execute in order to

work on your project. But the assumption here is that you know pretty much where all the

commands are at this point and all you really need to be able to see are the tabs. And if I say

wanted to switch from say Gantt Chart View into Network Diagram View, I know thats on the

Task tab; its the left hand command. All you then have to do is to click on Task, go to that

command as we did just now, click there, change to Network Diagram View, select Network

Diagram, Project 2013 switches into Network Diagram View and minimizes the Ribbon again.

So not only does it execute the command, but it also puts the Ribbon out of the way again as

well. Now when youre confident enough in your use of Project 2013, you may want to choose

that approach to give yourself some more space to work in.

Now if you take that approach to collapsing the Ribbon, there may, of course, come a point in

time where you decide maybe youre doing something different you havent done before and you

need to be able to see the Ribbon all of the time so that you can find the right commands or

indeed youre using one of the contextual tabs that youre maybe not so familiar with, then if you

right click, say, on one of the tabs so youre sure that youre using the Ribbon. One of the

options there Collapse the Ribbon, the bottom one, just uncheck that and the Ribbon is expanded

and you can see it all of the time again.

Now theres just one other thing Id like to look at in relation to the Ribbon here. If you right

click somewhere on the Ribbon, you see a number of options here and one of them, Customize

the Ribbon, second from the bottom. Click on Customize the Ribbon. That actually takes you

into the Project Options that were going to look at later on in the course in detail. But one of the

pages on the Project Options is Customize Ribbon. Now this is outside the scope of this course.

Im not going to go into this at all in detail now but it may be something you want to find out for

later on and that is that you can customize the Ribbon. You can add your own tab. You can

Project 2013


create a Ribbon tab of your own. You can create your own groups to put on it and you can

choose from the available commands in Project 2013 to make up that group or those groups on

your own tab. There is a limit to what you can do to rearrange the standard tabs and groups but

you can certainly create your own. I pointed out the main tabs here: Task, Resource, Report,

Project, View. There are some other standard tabs: Add-ins, Developer, Compare Projects. And

apart from the main tabs there are tool tabs, a couple of which weve already seen, but actually

theyre quite a lot of tool tabs in Project 2013 and well see a few of those as we go as well. So

as I say this is outside the scope of this course but if you find you are doing a job where it would

be really helpful to, say, have a particular set of commands all in one place to save switching

around on the Ribbon all the time, then I suggest you look into customizing the Ribbon.

So thats it for the Ribbon. In the next section, were going to look at the Quick Access Toolbar.

Ill see you then.

Project 2013


Video: Quick Access Toolbar

Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, were going to

take a look at the Quick Access Toolbar which sits in the top left hand corner of the window.

The purpose of the Quick Access Toolbar, as its name implies, is to give us quick access to a

selected small number of commands that we use frequently and really want at our fingertips so

that we can execute them quickly and easily whenever we need them.

Now at any one time on the Quick Access Toolbar, youll be able to see a selection of

commands. On mine at the moment, there are actually four shown. There is Save, there is Undo

and there is Redo and there is the command that we used, the button that we used to switch

between touch and mouse mode. Now noticeably, the Redo command is currently grayed out.

The reason its grayed out is because redo means redo something Ive just undone. Ive not

undone anything so theres nothing to redo so that commands grayed out. But in general terms,

if I click on the drop down to the right hand end here, the one that has the screen tip of

Customize Quick Access Toolbar, Ill see that there are about a dozen commands that I can show

and I show or hide them just by checking them. So if I wanted the Quick Print command here on

the Quick Access Toolbar, if I just check it by clicking it, Quick Print now appears up there as

well. Now its not a good idea to have loads and loads of these commands spreading across the

top of the window because youre going to clash into other things, but if you choose the ones that

you think are most useful to you to have always on hand, thats the process of customizing the

Quick Access Toolbar.

Now in addition to switching commands on and off, you can actually customize it in a more

extensive way and you can add commands to the Quick Access Toolbar. So lets take a look at

how to do that.

So to customize the Quick Access Toolbar, click on the drop down there and then one of the

commands down at the bottom says More Commands, click on that, and that takes us into

another page of the Project Options, the page thats called Quick Access Toolbar. Now on that

page there is a list initially of the popular commands within Project 2013. There may be about

50 of those commands. But if I use the drop down at the top here, youll see that if I looked at

All Commands, so select that instead, you will see that in Project 2013 overall there are literally

hundreds of commands and I could add any of those to the Quick Access Toolbar. Now Im not

Project 2013


going to add some sort of vaguely esoteric command. Lets go back to the popular ones. Lets

choose say the Copy command. If I select Copy there and click on Add, the button in the

middle, the Copy command will be added to the Quick Access Toolbar. If I then click on OK,

you can now see up there, there is a Copy command on the Quick Access Toolbar.

So its as easy as that to customize whats shown. What sometimes happens if youre doing a

particular job in Project 2013 is that you find you have something repetitive to do. I mentioned

earlier on that you might create your own tab and your own group and put your own commands

in it. Well, another good option is being able to add one or two commands to the Quick Access

Toolbar while youre doing perhaps a particular job and then you can remove them again.

To remove a command from the Quick Access Toolbar, click on the drop down again, go into

More Commands again, choose the one you want to remove, in this case Copy. So I select Copy

on the right, and then the other button in the middle is Remove. Click on OK and that Copy

command is no longer included in the Quick Access Toolbar.

Now theres one other thing you can do with the Quick Access Toolbar and that is if youre

doing a repetitive, perhaps complicated or perhaps even slightly boring job, then you can actually

show the Quick Access Toolbar below the Ribbon. Click on the drop down again, choose the

very bottom command, Show below the Ribbon, it appears down there. The reason sometimes

that people like that is that when youre working within the main area, say youre working on a

Gantt Chart here, you dont have to stretch across the Ribbon to find the command that you

want, possibly hit something on the Ribbon on the way. Youve got the Quick Access Toolbar

right next to the area youre working in. To put that back where it was, its pretty

straightforward; just click on Show above the Ribbon again. So Im going to show this back

above the Ribbon and thats really it on the Quick Access Toolbar, pretty straightforward.

In the next section, were going to look at mini toolbars. So please join me for that.

Project 2013


Video: Mini Toolbar

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, were going to look at mini

toolbars. These can be used both in mouse mode and in touch mode, and they give us a very

quick way of accessing important commands.

Now in order to demonstrate mini toolbars, what Ive done here is to just type some text into the

table part of a Gantt Chart. This is a new project and Ive just put in a task name of Task 1.

Now how and why I did that isnt really important. All I want you to see is that weve now got

an entry in the task name. If I now right click with the mouse in that particular cell in the table,

what I see is a little menu flying out and above that menu there is a little toolbar and thats what

we refer to as the Mini Toolbar.

Now what you actually see in that mini toolbar depends on the circumstances, depends on what

youre looking at, what youre doing, and so on. But normally what it will contain is the

commands that youre most likely to need depending on what youre doing at that exact point in

time. Now in this case, Ive typed in the name of a task. Ive just called it Task 1. And amongst

the things that you can see on the mini toolbar is a command to let me change the font. The font

there at the moment is Calibri. If I wanted to change it to a different font, theres a drop down

there that I could use to change the font. So let me just use the mini toolbar to change the font.

So I could go say from Calibri to Broadway, and then theres a command to change the font size.

And then other commands including commands to do things like make the text bold, italic, to

color it, or using this little drop down here with the bar on it to indicate how complete that

particular task is. So theres quite a range of things that I can do using that mini toolbar.

Now having made that change to the font, let me just point out one of the commands on the

Quick Access Toolbar that we looked at earlier on. So click back up there, undo, and Im back

to the original font again.

Now lets try the equivalent using touch. Weve already used tap in touch which is the

equivalent to click with the mouse. And obviously when youre using an Office program like

Project, youre going to do an awful lot of clicking, so a lot of tapping. You also tend to use

right click quite a bit and right click is how we brought up the mini toolbar and that little menu

just now. Pretty much the same with touch except that with touch the equivalent is tap and hold.

Project 2013


So what Im going to do is tap and hold on Task 1 and that will bring up the touch version of the

Mini Toolbar. So tap and hold. Notice how the cursor shape changes to a square, release it, and

up comes the mini toolbar for touch. Now the mini toolbars tend to be about the same. They

tend to have a lot of commands in common but there are usually some differences between the

ones you get with mouse and the ones you get with touch. You can see there that the core of the

toolbars are the same but also with this touch one, youve got these Paste, Cut, and Copy

commands on it as well. And there will usually be some differences and thats a fairly typical

type of difference.

Now while were looking at that mini toolbar and note how much bigger it is than the other one,

the usual reason so that you can operate it with your fingers. But at the right hand end, theres a

drop down and thats what were going to talk about in the next section. If you click on the drop

down, that gives you access to the equivalent right click menu.

So thats it. Thats how you access the mini toolbars. Many people prefer using those to using

the Ribbon a lot and particularly if you collapse the Ribbon, you may find the mini toolbar mean

that you rarely need to go near the Ribbon, but that will depend on what you do and your own

preference in terms of operating Project 2013.

Okay, in the next section were going to have a very quick look at those right click menus. What

we call those are contextual menus. So please join me for that.

Project 2013


Video: Contextual Menu

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this short section, Id just like to look at

the contextual menus that you can see in Project 2013. Im going to demonstrate this with a

couple of examples using the mouse and then one using touch.

As we saw in the previous section, depending on what youre doing, you will be able to see a

little sort of fly out menu if you right click. If I right click within a cell in the table here for the

Gantt Chart in this project, the menu that flies out has cut cell, copy cell, scroll to task, insert

task, delete task, a whole range of commands that are relevant to what Im looking at, the view

Im in, and what I can possibly do at that point in time. Notice that many of the commands are

grayed out so I cant actually use those at the moment. And also notice with some of them, for

instance this one, Assign resources dot, dot, dot. That indicates to me that if I click that, there

will be more for me to do. In this case and in fact in many cases, that means if I click that option

Ill get a dialog box to work with where Ill need to make some selections, maybe take some

further actions. So let me just click on that one and that brings up the Assign Resources dialog

that well be looking at later on.

Now exactly what you see on that menu depends on where you are and what youre doing. So if

I were to right click on what is the graphical part of the Gantt Chart over here, then the menu I

get is a very different menu. It lets me change my settings for grid lines, enables me to format

bar styles, work on layout, but virtually all of the commands there are completely different to the

ones on the left. Similarly, if I go into a different view, so if I went from Gantt Chart View into

Network Diagram View and right click there, again I get a completely different set of

commands.

Now as I demonstrated in the previous section, if you want to do right click and look at the menu

you get with touch, then if you tap and hold, so tap, hold till you get the square, release your

finger, up comes a contextual menu. Now in some cases, you wont directly get that menu as

you do here. You may get a mini toolbar and then there will be a drop down arrow on the mini

toolbar to give you access to the menu and thats what we saw in the previous section. So if I

now just switch back to Gantt Chart View using touch, so tap on that command, go back to Gantt

Chart, again tap somewhere, hold, bring up the mini toolbar, tap on the drop down arrow on the

right, and thats how I get my menu. Now, youll see the menu flying off the edge of the screen

Project 2013


there. Unfortunately because of the way I have to record this course, you wont necessarily

always see all of every menu that I use but Ill try to make sure that anything on the menu that

were actually going to use you can always see. But I hope from that you get the general idea of

how these contextual menus work using either mouse or touch.

Now theres one other thing I need to look at before we move on and Im going to cover that in

the next section, and thats the status bar. Please join me for that.

Project 2013


Video: Status Bar

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, were going to look at the

status bar right at the bottom of the window there and Im going to concentrate to begin with on

whats on the left hand part of the status bar.

So let me just explain how the status bar works. If I right click on it, it brings up a sort of menu.

Its really a list of properties. And with each of the properties, cell mode, calculation, macro

recording, filter, AutoFilter, you can decide whether theyre shown or not on the status bar. Now

the bottom two properties, view shortcuts and zoom slider, relate to the right hand end of the

status bar and Ill come back to those in a moment. But all of the others would be shown on the

left hand side. Now almost all of them are ticked which means that their values are shown, but

for many of them such as filter which is ticked so its value is shown, its value is nothing. So the

filter is shown but its empty. AutoFilter is shown, but its blank, its empty. Roll up is shown

but its blank, its empty. So these values are all being shown but theyre all blank, theyre all

nothing. The exceptions are new tasks down there; current value is manually schedule. Well be

looking at that later on. If I un-tick that, then it wont be shown. Watch what happens on the

status bar if I un-tick that. There we are. Its no longer shown and now its shown again.

Similarly, if I go up to the top and look at cell mode which is shown and its current value is

Ready. If I uncheck it by clicking, I now find it no longer says Ready. Check it again, Im now

showing the cell mode again. Calculation is off. This is a bit of an exception really because with

calculation off it doesnt actually say Off anywhere and well come back to that again later as

well. And then macro recording, not recording. If I click on showing that value and Im not

recording a macro, then the little icon that just appeared on the status bar there indicates that Im

not recording a macro. Now later on many of these other things will make sense to you and

youll decide which ones you want to show on the status bar and which ones you dont want to

show on the status bar.

So now lets take a look at the right hand end of the status bar, and what we have at the right

hand end of the status bar are a set of buttons that we can use to switch between views of the

current project. And we also have a slider on the right that generally determines how far zoomed

in we are on timescales. Now the different views of the project that are available include the first

one which is the Gantt Chart View, then we have a Task Usage View, a Team Planner View, a

Project 2013


Resource Sheet View, and then we have a Report View. Later on when weve looked at each of

these types of view, youll find in different situations that one or other of those views will be the

most suitable for the particular thing youre doing at that time. There are in fact many other

views available as well see later, but these are the ones that are most commonly used and

probably the ones that youll want to switch between the most.

Now were in Gantt Chart View at the moment and the slider basically lets you zoom in and out

in terms of timescale. So at the moment, were roughly in the middle. The sliders roughly

centrally placed. If I moved it right over to the right, so thats zooming into the timescale,

getting much closer, much more detailed in time. If you look at the times slots along the top

there, youll see that on the right were now working at the level of not just a day in view but the

hours of the day. So we can zoom right in to a very fine level of detail. Back in the middle.

Each time slot is a few days or a couple of weeks or a few weeks. And then as we move to the

left, we start getting a whole month in a time slot. Further still were looking at quarters.

Further still, half years and then you can go right over you can go to the whole years. So the

timescale zooming out and zooming in with the slider enable you to take a broad view of your

project or a very close up view of your project depending on what you need at the time.

So thats it. Thats the status bar. Were going to be using that at various points during the

course and, of course, well be looking at those other views in a lot more detail later as well.


Project 2013


Chapter 6 Keyboard Shortcuts

Documents

Learn Microsoft Project 2013.pdf