Microsoft Project 2019 – Entering Tasks
Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2019. In this section, I’m going to start work on the project plan for a wedding.
Different people would have very different opinions on what might be part of the arrangements for a wedding. So what I’m going to try and do is come up with a project plan. It’s for a wedding that has enough detail in it to be reasonably realistic.
But which will also reflect the different styles of wedding. You may get in different parts of the world in different cultures and so on.
Having said that, the style of wedding that I’m planning here is not one that’s associated with any particular religion.
What you’re going to be doing very soon is planning the refit of a bathroom in a domestic house. So what I’m going to try and show you while I’m doing this wedding plan is some of the ideas. I want you to incorporate into building up the plan for the bathroom refit.
You may well find when you’re looking at either of these projects that they don’t really reflect. How you would set about doing them but really that’s not the point. You’re learning the tools in Microsoft Project to do these things. You’re not actually learning how to either plan a wedding or refit a bathroom.
Another important point to make here is that we’re building these things up in layers. I’m not going to go deep into the details straight away. We will certainly get into the detail. But what we will do is one layer at a time. I’ll explain the tools and techniques associated with Project 2019 as we go.
So, first of all, I’ve made a list of the main aspects of this wedding plan. So let’s take a look at that first.
I’m sure this isn’t going to be quite right but I’ve made this list. It’s actually in the course file folder if you want a copy of this list. And it’s Planning,
Attire and attire. I mean basically, the clothes that people are going to wear. But it’s probably a little bit broader than that, Guests, Venue, Catering, Flowers, Memories, Details, Wedding Day, and Honeymoon.
So they’re going to be my main headings. And the first thing I’m going to do is to start adding each of those into my project plan. So let’s take this first one, Planning, and set that one up first.
I’ve created a new blank project and in the task name. I’m going to enter Planning. Now a couple of things to point out here. I’m using the Gantt Chart View.
I did show you briefly earlier on in the course a couple of ways of switching to Gantt Chart View.
One way is to use the buttons down towards the right-hand end of the Status Bar. You can also go into the View tab and select Gantt Chart View there. Another thing to bear in mind is that you should have new tasks set to auto-scheduled. What I’m going to do next won’t work for you.
Having entered Planning as the task name, I press the Tab key. Then, a number of fields are filled in for my first task and one of them is the duration. By default, a task has a duration of one day with a question mark normally.
Now, what the question mark means is that this is an estimated duration. One normally does is to leave the duration as an estimate. You have actually got a reasonably reliable duration for that task. Now at this stage, I’m not going to worry about duration at all.
I’m just going to get all of those tasks in the list. But bear in mind those question marks are a good way of reminding myself. It’s just an estimate of the duration. And believe me when planning a wedding it’s a lot longer than a one day task.
Let’s ignore the Work column for a moment and let’s take a look at Start. And you can just about see the start date is Tuesday, March the 5th 2019.
One thing that may or may not be annoying you. That is being able to see the contents of all of these fields. Let’s deal with that first. If you need to make these columns wider or narrower, you hover over the edge. Then, you’ll see the cursor change to a double-headed arrow.
If you click the mouse at that point. Drag one way or the other you can make the columns wider or narrower. Depending on your personal preference.
We’re going to do a little bit more work on how to format Gantt Charts. And also, how to lay them out more neatly later on. But for the moment, that’s probably one of the most important things you need to be able to do is just resizing those columns.
There is a bar, a vertical dividing line between the table on the left and the chart on the right. When you hover over that vertical bar in any way you get a slightly different double-headed arrow.
You can change the divider. By doing that, you can see more or less of the table or more or less of the chart. So again that’s entirely up to you and how you like to work.
Let’s go back to this start date, Tuesday, March the 5th 2019. Now by default new tasks are either created on the project start date or on the current date.
In this case, both the start and finish date are the same. They’re today’s date. And you can check which it’s set to by looking at Project Options on the Schedule page. I do suggest you have a quick look at that now.
So what is the project start date? By default, the project start date is the date I created the project. And I created this project today, so that’s why we have a start date of today.
If you click on the Project tab on the Ribbon and in the Properties group, normally the first button. There is Project Information. Let’s click on that. One of the basic pieces of information we have in there is the start date for the project. It is showing here currently highlighted. It will also tell you in this case what the finish date is as well.
Now, of course, I haven’t really got much work scheduled for this project at the moment. So it means that I can start planning this wedding today. And, I can actually have the wedding today as well because I will be ready.
I’m just going to go back to what I was saying now about Project Options. You can see here that we’re scheduling from the project start date. Some projects might be scheduled from the project finish date.
Now it’s very conventional to start a project and say to yourself: “When will I be ready?”. But also what often happens is that you know when you’ve got to be finished by. Also, what you really need to know is when you should start the project.
You can do both of those types of scheduling in Project 2019. It’s very important to know at any time whether you’re scheduling from the start date or to the finish date.
The approach we’re taking now with planning this wedding is that we’re starting at the start date. Also, when we’ve done all the planning and got all the other activities. We’ll know when we can be ready by.
We haven’t got a date for the wedding yet. We need to do a lot of work to do. A lot of planning first. But we will find out when we would be ready to have the wedding by.
So, let me cancel this dialog for now. Then, I’m going to put in a couple more of the tasks into my project.
Okay, so I’ve got those three tasks in there now. You might be slightly surprised by how my plan looks but there are very good reasons for it. At the moment I’ve not told Project 2019 much about these tasks at all.
I haven’t, for instance, said that Attire must happen after Planning or that Guests must happen after Attire. So it has no reason to put these tasks in any kind of sequence.
A very important point as well here. You don’t actually have to enter the tasks of a project in a chronological sequence.
I could put all of these in any order that I wanted to. But the convention is that the tasks you expect to at least start first go first in the list.
Now in the left-hand column here you have something called a Task ID. And, as you’ll see later on in the course Task IDs fulfill a very important purpose.
But one way of looking at this is that generally speaking the convention. It is that the task with the lower IDs corresponds to the tasks that are performed earliest in the project.
Having said that, as you’ll see later on with this wedding plan the individual elements that make up each of these tasks. Bear in mind; we’re going to break each of these tasks down as we go through. We will overlap some of the things that we thought were going to be earlier on or will be later on and so on.
And in any case, as the project progresses things will tend to change. So having the earliest tasks like the ones with the lowest ID numbers is more of a sort of general guideline than any sort of specific rule.
The next thing I’m going to do is put in the rest of those tasks.
And there we are. I have all those headings in. All of them have an estimated duration of one day. It is clearly not the case, but we have a starting point for our plan.
Having done that work the next most important thing to do is save that plan. And that’s what we’re going to do firsts in the next section. So, I will see you then.
Deborah Ashby
Deborah Ashby is a TAP Accredited IT Trainer, specializing in the design, delivery, and facilitation of Microsoft courses both online and in the classroom.She has over 11 years of IT Training Experience and 24 years in the IT Industry. To date, she's trained over 10,000 people in the UK and overseas at companies such as HMRC, the Metropolitan Police, Parliament, SKY, Microsoft, Kew Gardens, Norton Rose Fulbright LLP.She's a qualified MOS Master for 2010, 2013, and 2016 editions of Microsoft Office and is COLF and TAP Accredited and a member of The British Learning Institute.
