Microsoft Project 2019 – The Status Bar

In this section, I’d like to take a quick look at the Status Bar of Microsoft Project 2019. I’m going to deal with it in two parts, the left part, and the right part.

Importantly, if you right-click anywhere on the Status Bar, you’ll see a list of potential contents. Whatever is ticked is currently shown. 

Note the head of there, Customize Status Bar. You might be surprised to see so many ticks but actually less information on the Status Bar at all.

The reason for this is that apart from the bottom two entries, View Shortcuts and Zoom Slider. Those are shown at the right-hand end of the Status Bar.

On the left, correspond to optional pieces of information you can show for which very often don’t show anything at all.

So for example, if you look at the item fourth down in the list there, Filter,
it’s ticked. It shows the name of the filter if a filter has been applied to the current view

Now, in this case, no filter is being applied and therefore you don’t see anything. So with quite a few of these items even though they’re ticked most of the time you won’t see anything unless you’re using that particular feature. 

Now there are a couple of things shown at the left-hand end. One of them is Ready, which is the cell mode. If I click Cell Mode so that it’s not shown you’ll see the effect.

It no longer says Ready because I’m not showing the cell mode. The other thing that’s shown is whether new tasks are manually scheduled or auto-scheduled.

If I click New Tasks it will no longer show that currently they’re manually scheduled by default. Now the other items although they’re ticked there’s nothing to see.

One of them that isn’t ticked is this one, which is the Macro Recording indicator. We’re currently not recording a macro and a macro is a sequence of steps that we can replay automatically.

If I check that you’ll see the little icon that indicates that we’re not recording. If I started recording a macro and left this checked then you would see a different icon whilst we’re recording.

And in fact, that icon would give you a way of stopping the recording also. We’re not going to be covering macro recording any time soon so let’s check that backoff.

Let’s now concentrate on the right-hand end of the Status Bar. Now we’re going to look at the bottom two options there and the first one is View Shortcuts.

This corresponds to this set of buttons that I can use to enable different views of my project. So let me just click away there. I currently have Gantt Chart View.

If I go to this one that’s Task Usage View, the next one is Team Planner View, we have Resource Sheet View and finally Report View. I’ll be covering all of these later on in the course.

The fact that the second to bottom option is ticked means that those buttons are there to enable me to easily switch between those views. As an alternative to those, I can select the view I want from the View tab on the Ribbon. And in fact, there are many more options on the View tab on the Ribbon.

The very bottom option is Zoom Slider and this gives me access to the control that I can use to zoom in and out of the current view, which is this slider over here.

So let me click out again and go to the slider. And this basically zooms by time. So as I zoom out I get a broader view of time. So now you can see that I’m looking at quarters.

If I zoom in by clicking the plus button there I’m down to months, then weeks, then eventually I get down to individual days. It is quite a course control but I can use that if I want to.

Or on the View tab in the Ribbon, there is a Zoom group and that lets me be much more accurate and much more flexible about how much I’m zoomed in on the current view.

So that’s it. That’s the Status Bar. Please join me 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.