Microsoft Project 2019: Subtasks and Outlining

Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2019. In this section, we’re going to look at summary tasks and outlining. And I’m going to use the wedding project. I’ll demonstrate how we can build up the level of detail and the structure of this project.

I mentioned a couple of times already that the tasks that I currently have in the project. Planning, Attire, Guests, Venue, etcetera are actually high-level tasks.

They really represent groups of tasks. What we’re going to start to do now is to flesh this plan out a little bit and break up each of those high-level tasks. What we’re going to call summary tasks, down into individual tasks or subtasks.

By the end of this section, we’ll have a much more detailed project plan. But to get us started I want to look at one particular summary task.

And just before we get into it I want to point out two things. First of all, if you were doing a breakdown of the tasks involved in a wedding project. Particularly if you’re doing it from scratch. You would almost certainly come up with a different breakdown to me.

So the tasks that I’m going to add, you might not necessarily add to your project plan. But just remember, this is a guide as we go through. You can add whichever kinds of tasks you like. But it is important that all of the necessary tasks in the project are represented ultimately in the project plan.

The second thing to point out. Although you’re going to add quite a bit of detail to this wedding project plan. You could add a lot more. Again, don’t use what I’m doing as a cast in the iron guide. You add in the tasks that are relevant to whatever it is that you’re planning.

Now we’re probably going to end up with something in the order of between 50 and 100 tasks in total. If you were doing this for real, and it was a particularly thorough plan. You might have hundreds and hundreds of tasks. So, please just bear that in mind as we go through.

So, the task I’m going to breakdown first is this one here. The Guests task. If I click on Venue and then right-click my mouse, I can go to Insert Task.

What that will do is it will insert this new task item surrounded by chevrons. It’s underneath Guests and this means this is going to be one of my Guests subtasks.

It gets a default name of New Task. The defaults values for Duration, Work, Start, and Finish Date as well. Now, I’m going to rename this task to make it a little bit more meaningful.

And all I need to do is click on the Entry bar at the top and type in the name. So I’m going to call this one Make Guest List and hit Enter. So that’s my first Guest related task.

Now, the important thing here is that this is actually a subtask of my Guests task. And in order to indicate that it’s a subtask, I’m going to demote it in my task hierarchy. There is a button in the Schedule group on the Task tab for that.

So if you go to the Schedule group you’ll see you have Promote and Demote buttons. And you’ll see if I hover over this one: it says Indent Task. And it gives me the keyboard shortcut for that. If I hover over the other one it says Outdent Task. If I click on Indent, the task automatically demotes within its hierarchy.

Now, not only does Make Guest List get indented. It clearly indicates that this is a subtask of Guest. Because of a number of other things that are going on here as well.

One of them is that the word Guests has now become bold, indicating that this is a summary task. Also, it gets this tiny little wedge or triangle next to the word Guests. We can use that wedge to collapse or expand any of the subtasks related to that task.

So if I click it my subtask disappears. If I click it again it reappears. This is really useful in a real sort of great space-saving trick when you have lots and lots of tasks. Which we will do as we build this up.

You can just collapse up the group. If you’re not particularly interested in a particular group of tasks at that moment in time. It just enables you to see a lot more of maybe the tasks that you are more interested in. So it’s a really great way of being able to control that.

Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to put in a second subtask. So I’m going to click on Venue again. I’m going to right-click and select Insert Task. Now, this new task has clearly gone above Venue again. But it also inherits the indentation level, what we call the outline level of the task above it.

It automatically becomes a subtask of Guest because it gets the same indentation level. Let me again type in a name for my new task up to the Entry Bar. We’re going to say for this one Send out invitations: very important thing to remember. And click on the tick or press Enter.

Now, my column is wide enough to accommodate Send out invitations. But if I did have my column slightly less wide, slightly narrower. I should say you’ll see that the text automatically wraps around in the cell.

I’m just going to take that back. By double-clicking to expand to the length of the longest piece of text in this column.

Now if when I enter this Send out invitations wasn’t actually meant to be a subtask of Guests. Aall I need to do is make sure that I’ve got the task selected. And then, one of the other buttons in the Schedule group is the other one that we’ll use.

So Outdent Task. So if I click that you can see it moves it ever so slightly. And it’s no longer a subtask of Guests. And we can test that even further. If I was to collapse that Guest task you can see that I can still see Send out invitations.

It hasn’t been hidden with the rest of this group essentially. So very easy to indent and outdent tasks to either make them tasks or subtasks.

Now in this instance. I do actually want to Send out invitations to be part of this Guest group.

So, I’m just going to highlight it again. And then, use my Indent Task button to make that a subtask of Guests once again.

What I’m going to do now is go through. Then, add in a third and a fourth subtask for the task Guests.

So having entered the fourth subtask let me just point out something else here. Let me right click on Book guest accommodation. Note that the Indent and the Outdent buttons are both available here as well on the mini toolbar.

So if you wanted to you could use those as well. And as usual, as you’re working in Project 2019, Project itself offers you the most likely commands. Either the contextual menu or the mini toolbar. So, keep your eyes open for those. Because they often give you a very quick way of working on a task like this.

Now at this point. You may feel inclined to work out how long each of the tasks is going to take. And also, when each of them needs to happen and so on. I don’t want you to worry about any of those things at the moment.

We’re going to come back to the duration and the timescales and dependencies and so on. As we go through the next sections of the course. All I want to do at the moment is to put in the structure of the project. And then, we’ll start to add the detail a little bit later on.

Having said that there’s one more thing I need to show you here about summary tasks. So let me go to Make a guest list and I’m going to increase the duration to 8 days.

Now, if you look over at the Gantt Chart itself. You’ll see that the Make guest list task is indeed now eight days long. But, you’ll also see, the summary task no longer has the same type of bar representing it as a standard subtask.

The summary task has a different format bar on the right there. Now we’re going to talk about Gantt Chart formatting much later on. You can in fact change most aspects of formatting of these bars anyway.

But there are two important things. One of them is that the summary task does have a different format of the bar. It helps it stand out on the right there. But also the summary task by default does not have a duration of its own.

The duration of the summary task is actually the duration from. It is when the first subtask starts right through to when its latest subtask ends. So the duration of the summary task is in effect dictated by the scheduling of these subtasks.

If we look at ours here: our Guest task is showing in this format. And it is showing eight days. Because the longest task or the longest subtask I should say that we have currently is Make a guest list. In which is also eight days long.

And the other subtasks are only one day. Hence, why this bar is showing as currently being eight days long? Because it will show the duration of the longest subtask in the list.

What I’m going to do now is to insert the rest of the subtasks for this particular project. Now, if you’d actually like to do this yourself rather than use the sample file. The demo file, that I’ll tell you about towards the end of this section. There is a text file in the course file folder.

And this text file lists each of the subtasks under its relevant summary task. So if you want a bit of practice you could go through and set all of these up. This is what you’ll see in that text file. And again just a reminder, it’s called SSI-Projet2019-wedding-task-breakdown.txt. So please feel free to use that as a practice.

So here is the revised wedding plan. This will be the version that I’ll save as Wedding 02. If you want to take a look and perhaps somehow compare it with the version you’ve made yourself that’s fine. There is one other area now that we need to look at and in order to look at that area. What I’m going to do is add even more detail to this temporarily.

I’m going to take the task Select and order wedding dress. I’m going to break that down into three further subtasks. And now, I’m going to right-click. Select Insert Task. The first one is going to be Select wedding dress. Click the tick.

And I’m going to then indent that to make it a subtask of Select and order wedding dress. You’ll see as immediately when I do that the task above, Select and order wedding dress becomes bold. I get my little triangle at the side, that expandable and collapsible triangle. Let’s do another one. Same process.

Right, click Insert Task, and we’ll call this one Order dress and the final one might be Measurements and fittings. And you’ll see that all of them have taken on the same indentation of the subtask that we added. And then we might, for example, breakdown Measurements and fittings into

Measurements and then First fitting, Second fitting, Third fitting, something like that. We’re already getting pretty deep into building out that structure for our plan. Even though we’re in the very early stages of planning this project,

When you’re looking at a plan like this and bearing in mind that we’ve still only got to the roundabout. Let’s have a look.

Right to the bottom, under 50, under 45 tasks I should say. The highest ID number there if we scroll down is 43.

If we really went in and put in all of the detail. It’s actually making your way around this plan would start to get quite complicated. Because it will look more and more complicated.

We haven’t even started yet on durations and assigning resources and putting in dependencies and time constraints and so on. So there’ll be much more detail to add.

It’s usually the case when you start to increase the size of a project that you only want to look at certain parts at certain times. Even that you only want to look at the project at a certain level.

There is a straightforward way of determining the level of detail that you see in a plan. Such as this one.

I’m scrolled back up to the top of my plan. I’m going to select Attire. The Attire summary task.

And that’s the task with the ID of four. If I click on the View tab, and I’m going to go to the Data group. There is an Outline button just here. If you look at the description you can see the screen tip has come up.

It says, Specify which outline level should be used in the view. For a large project, you may want to collapse everything to outline level one or two. Then expand only the sections that interest you.

If I have Attire selected, and I click on the bottom of this Outline button let’s see what happens. If I say select for example Hide Subtasks.

Now, you’ll only see Attire and all the subtasks and all levels below it are hidden. Let’s go back to the Outline button again and if I want to show those subtasks I just click on Show Subtasks and there we go.

Now, in fact, I can apply this same principle to the whole project. So, I click on the bottom of the Outline button again and say click on Level 1. Then, it’s going to show me the outline level one.

And look what’s happened here. All I see is everything just at level one. If I click on Level 2 I get to see everything at level two. But note with Task ID 5, Select and order wedding dress. Under Attire level two means that I don’t see its subtasks.

I only see the level two subtask. Select and order wedding dress. So as you can see the summary tasks, like Planning and Attire and Guest. These are all at what we call level one. The level below that is level two and so on.

There is in Project 2019 a level zero. And level zero is actually pretty important so let me show you what level zero is.

If you go into the Gantt Chart Tools and the Format tab, towards the right-hand end in the Show/Hide group there is a checkbox for Project Summary Task.

And the Project Summary Task has some very important uses, some of which we’re going to look at during the duration of this course.

Now I already have this switched on but if I was to take the tick out of that box, just look in the task name field what happens when I untick Project Summary Task.

Can you see it removes that main heading? Let me click it again and you can see SSI Wedding 02 comes back. And there is a duration for the project summary task, which in effect is the duration of the entire project currently.

And as we’ll see there are many aspects of the project that we need to use the project summary task in order to deal with, but more on those things later.

So I’m going to select the Project Summary Task. I’m going to go back into the Outline and I’m going to Hide Subtasks.

So bearing in mind anything you select in this Outline group applies to the task that you’re currently clicked on, which is why I clicked on the Project Summary Task and now you can see it’s hidden pretty much every task in my project. So let me put those back again, show Subtasks and my project come back.

And then finally since I’ve put in the subtask, subtask five here, Select and order a wedding dress, I think I’ll leave these for now. They may be a little bit useful later on.

So that’s it on summary tasks and outlining. Please join me for Exercise 02 in the next section.

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.