Navigating the Workspace in Microsoft Project 2016
During this Microsoft Project 2016 training tutorial video, we will demonstrate the different parts of the project workspace such as the quick access toolbar, minimize, restore down, close, ribbon, the project name, entry bar, timeline, main project window and status bar. How to get to the backstage view is also discussed.
Video Transcript
In this section I’m going to take you on a tour of the Project workspace and we’re also going to start creating a very simple project. And I’ll use that very simple project to demonstrate key points concerning the Project workspace.
You’ve already seen this Start screen and you’ll probably see this quite a few times during the course. Although as you’ll see a little bit later on you may want to disable the Start screen once you really get used to using Project 2016. You may decide that you can get along perfectly well without it.
Now let me give you a quick tour of the Start screen itself.
Over on the left we have an area which gives us links to existing projects. We have a Recent section. Currently this section is empty. As you can see the note there says you haven’t opened any projects recently. Once we start working on projects you’ll start to see a list of recent projects appear there. And then below that there is a link, Open other Projects, which gives us access to a Windows Browse Dialogue so you can browse your computer, you can browse any network locations you have access to and you can browse Cloud areas, such as your OneDrive storage. Now we’re going to start with a new project so we won’t be using that part of the Start screen on this occasion.
In the top right we have some standard Windows buttons. The little question mark is Help. Note the Screen Tip there. Help and F1 is the keyboard shortcut for that. Then we have Minimize and we have Maximize or Restore, depending on whether your screen is currently maximized or not. And then we also have a Close button. Below that we have my name and the account under which I am currently running Project 2016. This is very important. If you’re the only person that uses this PC and you’re the only person that uses Project on this PC and you only have one account that you ever run Project under then this will always indicate that account. But if, for example, you sometimes use a work account and sometimes a personal account, if you share this PC with somebody else you may want to switch between accounts. Well the facility here, Switch Account, let’s you switch between those accounts. And I’ll demonstrate that to you a little bit later on.
Now let me talk about the rest of the Start screen. And I’m going to say this once more. I won’t keep saying it. You may not see exactly the same as me. It will depend on a number of things. But almost certainly the first thing you will see here is a Blank Project thumbnail. I’m going to click on that in a little while and we’re going to create a blank project. So that’s an empty starting point for a project. But I’m going to run through some of these others first.
If you run projects that have an element of similarity, maybe you do building projects, marketing projects, then you may already have a project that you’d like to base a new one on. And the second thumbnail here, New from Existing Project, enables you to use an existing project as a starting point for a new one. The third thumbnail, New from Excel Workbook, let’s you create a project from an Excel workbook. And what this basically means is that you have perhaps a list of tasks on a worksheet in an Excel workbook and you want to make that list of tasks the starting point for a project. The fourth thumbnail, New from SharePoint Tasks List, is a pretty similar kind of thing but in relation to SharePoint. So if you have a list of tasks in Microsoft SharePoint and you want to use those as the basis for a project you can use that option.
Now the other thumbnails all correspond to different standard project templates. So if I were working on a software development project I could use the first template there, Software Development Plan, and it would get me started on a typical set of tasks as a starting point for a software development project.
Now you’ll see a whole list of these templates. These templates you may think of in the old terminology as boiler plates but nowadays we generally call them templates. And there are many there. So Residential Construction is there, for example. New Business Plan is another one. But there are available online many, many templates that you can base new projects on.
And there is a Search facility at the top here. So if you wanted a project plan for a particular thing you could do a search here. In fact there are some standard searches, suggested searches as they called underneath. So Project Management, Project Plan, Project Themes, etcetera. Let’s suppose and this is definitely potentially going to be very useful, I wanted to look for a project plan for a wedding. Let me do a Search on wedding. This is of course an online facility so I need to be connected to the internet. Let’s try Wedding. And it comes up with a Wedding Planner. If I were to click on that wedding planner then it would let me see a little bit more detail about what this wedding planner is. So it shows me the first few tasks. It gives me a description. Wedding Planner provided by Microsoft Corporation. It tells me how big it is. It gives me a bit of a description about the wedding planner. And then I could use that to create a wedding plan. And in fact that’s not very far removed from what I’m going to do a little bit later on. But let me just close that for the moment and go back to this screen because apart from giving me potential Project Templates for a wedding there are search results from other Office applications. So it shows me potentially other useful artifacts related to other Office applications. Let’s look at PowerPoint for instance. There are seven found items related to PowerPoint. Now each of these is a template for a PowerPoint presentation. So there’s a wedding photo album, a wedding reception seating chart and a stylish photo cards template. Now there are other suitable wedding related artifacts that can be used in Word, Publisher, and Excel. So we’re not really going to cover that on this course but they can be very useful links to other artifacts that you can use with the other components of Office.
Having taken a look at that let’s go back to the Start screen. We just use the Back button there, the Browse Back button. It takes us back to the Start screen. And we’re going to create a blank project. Now as soon as I do this I want you to look in the bottom left hand corner of the screen because a little message will pop up for a few seconds that you’ll get used to seeing and after a while you’ll probably just ignore, but I need to explain it to you briefly now and then in a little bit more detail later on. So click on Blank Project, look down in the corner, New tasks are created in manually scheduled mode. As you’ll see later on there are two modes of scheduling. There’s manually scheduled and there’s auto-scheduled. Most of the time I tend to work in auto-scheduled mode. And after you’ve been using Project for a while you will choose which mode you prefer. The fact that I currently have this in manually scheduled mode and you may or may not have it in manually scheduled mode really doesn’t matter at the moment. Don’t worry about that. We’ll come back to that a little bit later on. What we need to concentrate on here is the workspace overall.
So first of all in the top left hand corner you have the Quick Access Toolbar that I mentioned earlier on in the course. You may not see quite the same buttons as me there but we’ll come back to that in a couple of sections time. And in the top right hand corner you have some standard Windows buttons. Let me just hover over those. So you have Minimize, Restore/Down and Close.
The main Ribbon is this. So it’s a big block right across the screen, very near the top. I’m going to explain the Ribbon to you in quite a bit of detail again in a couple of sections from now.
Above the Ribbon in the middle is the name of the current project. We’ve just created a project. By default it’s called Project 1. If we created another one by default it would be called Project 2 and so on.
Now below the Ribbon we have something called the Entry Bar. And the Entry Bar is something that we can use to enter and edit data into our project. You may or may not have that entry bar shown. If you don’t see that don’t worry. I’m going to show you in a while how to show that if it isn’t shown already. Basically the kind of thing we use the entry bar for is this. If I want to enter the name of the first task in my project I click in the Task Name Field there, first task name in the first row of my project. And then if I click in the Entry Bar I could call it Task 1. Having typed that I click on the tick mark to the left of task 1 and that is the name of my first task. If I click down to the next row and I intended to type Task 2, I could type Task 2, change my mind, click on the X to the left, the cross there, and that cancels what I’m typing. That’s the Entry Bar. More later.
Below the Entry Bar we have the Timeline. I mentioned the Timeline much earlier on when I was talking about what’s new and the fact that you can have several timelines now in Project 2016. You may or may not see the Timeline. If you don’t see it you can show it by, if you go up to the Ribbon, above the Ribbon there’s the word View. Click on View. Even if you don’t understand the Ribbon just click on View. And roughly in the middle, just to the right of the middle of the commands immediately under there there’s one that says Timeline. And as you can see it’s checked. Mine is ticked. That means the Timeline is shown. If I uncheck it the Timeline disappears. Check it again, the Timeline is now shown. So that’s the Timeline. When I’ve got some tasks it will show those tasks on the Timeline. Now in fact I’ve just entered one task there. It hasn’t got any work in it. And the timeline can be set to run over a period of time. Now by default my new project is starting today, so that’s December the 14th. And because I haven’t got any tasks or work that involve anything in them the end date, the finish date, at the right hand end of the timeline is also December the 14th. So it’s not the most exciting project in the world at the moment. I’m not really doing much and therefore it’s one of those situations where I can safely say that my project is on time.
Below the Timeline is the main project window. And by default on my installation I show a Gantt Chart. And a Gantt Chart actually comprises two parts. It comprises the list of tasks. It’s actually a table and we refer to this as the table. And on the right we have the chart itself which is normally a pictorial representation of the tasks in my project. Now you may or may not have a Gantt Chart shown. If you don’t have a Gantt Chart shown you will soon find out how to show a Gantt Chart there. And there will be situations when you’ll want to see one of the many other types of chart that you can show in the main body of the display there, the main window.
Now just to give you a little bit more of an idea of how that’s going to look let’s go back to that first task, Task 1. I’m going to click in the duration column there in line with Task 1. And I’m going to say that this is a two day task. Click elsewhere and there is my Gantt Bar for a two day task. Now there are various things about that bar in terms of its color, its ends and so on that each have significance and we’re going to talk about those later on. But basically as we start to build up a schedule we’ll build up entries in the table on the left and each of those will be represented by a Gantt Bar or other appropriate symbol in the chart on the right.
The next aspect of the workspace to look at is the Status Bar across the bottom of the project window. At the left hand end there are optional pieces of information. One of the ones that’s shown there now is New tasks are manually scheduled, which I mentioned earlier on in this section. And at the right hand end there are controls for the view. So we can do things like choose the view of the project we currently have and we can also use the Zoom controls, more on those later.
And the last part of the workspace that I want to look at is what’s called the Backstage or Backstage View. Now what we’re looking at here is effectively a project. It’s a very simple project with one ask in it at the moment but this is where we work on the contents of our project. Administration of projects, doing everything from saving them to printing them to sharing them, this is all done in what’s called Backstage View or just Backstage. And to get to Backstage View you click on File which is above the left hand end of the Ribbon. So if I click on File it takes me into Backstage View. Backstage View has a load of options, Info, New, Open, Save, etcetera, and we’ll be covering those as we go through the course. It’s also, for example, in Backstage View where we set up project information. When I’ve used Backstage View I get back to my project again using that Back button and that take me back into my project again.
So there we are. That’s all the basics of the workspace for now. In the next section I want to take a quick look at Help. So please join me for that.
Simon Calder
Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!
