MS Project: Add Custom Views and Using Earned Value

Name: MS Project: Add Custom Views and Using Earned Value
Author: Elissa Smith

A customized project management process is an efficient way to ensure projects are completed on time, on budget, and on goal. In this course, you’ll learn how…

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Hello. In this course, we want to explore how to create a custom view and save it in Microsoft Project. Now, currently my project does have a baseline applied to it, and I'd like to turn on my tracking Gantt chart and customize it, and then save it so that I can use it again. First of all, to turn on the tracking Gantt chart, I'm going to come up to my view ribbon. And on the view ribbon, you'll see an arrow next to the Gantt chart button. I'm going to click on this and select tracking Gantt. Again, the benefit of the tracking Gantt chart is that for each task you get two sets of Gantt bars. One for your baseline, and one for your actual tasks. I'd also like to change the color of the Gantt bars in my tracking Gantt. So I'm now going to travel up to the Gantt chart format ribbon and select a different Gantt bar style. The second thing I'd like to do is ensure that I have my critical tasks turned on. Right here, I just want to make sure that critical tasks is checked off in my bar styles group. And again, what this does is it allows me to see that whenever the top Gantt bar is red, it means that it's on the critical path. The other thing I'm going to do in my task table is come to the view group. And on the view ribbon, I'm going to select highlight, and I'd like to highlight my tasks that are critical. It turns these tasks, again, a bright highlight behind them. So, I know that currently these are the tasks that are on my critical path. Now that I've made all those customizations, I want to save this view so that if I ever want to go in and apply it again, I don't have to redo all those steps. To save the custom view, I'm going to come back up to my view ribbon tab and come to either the task views group or the resource views. They both have this button on them and it's called other views. And the other views group, I'm going to come down and select save view. And I'm going to give this view, again, a custom name. I'm going to call it Tracking Gantz with Critical Highlight. I know it's a lot, but it will help me remember what this particular view is for. Then I'm going to click on, okay. Now let's say that I'm done with this view and I want to go back to my normal Gantt chart. I'm going to come back up to the view ribbon tab, go back to my Gantt chart, and just select Gantt chart again. And you'll notice that all those customizations turn off. And how do I get back to my custom view? I'm going to come back to the other views option in either the task views group or the resource views group. And I'm going to go down to more views. In my more views list, I'm going to scroll down until I find my new Tracking Gantt with Highlight. Any custom views that I've created will be saved in this list. When I click on it, I then have to say apply for the view to actually be shown to me in Project. But you'll notice that it takes me directly to the tracking Gantt chart, and all those customizations including the highlight on the critical tasks are now available to me to see inside a project. To turn the custom view off, all I need to do go back up to the Gantt chart and click back on my default Gantt chart, and the custom view will turn off. Thanks so much for watching. In the next lesson, we're going to look at how you can create a custom view that will take up two sides of your screen, both the top half and the bottom half. Thanks so much for watching.

Advanced Provider : Elissa Smith 10 Lessons · 25m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

A customized project management process is an efficient way to ensure projects are completed on time, on budget, and on goal. In this course, you’ll learn how to create custom views for tables. This course covers combination views, and how to edit, copy, and create views. You’ll explore how to take a custom view and copy it into the organizer. You’ll also find out what an earned value analysis (EVA) is and how to set it up to view your project costs. Finally, you’ll see how to generate and view EVA tables for tasks and EVA resource tables.

What You'll Learn

Create and edit custom views and combination custom views for tables in MS Project
Copy existing views and create new views, including copying them to the organizer for future use
Set up an earned value analysis (EVA) to view your project costs
Generate an earned value report and view task data in an EVA table
View resource tables for earned value
Save a custom table in MS Project

Key Takeaways

A customized project management process helps ensure projects are completed on time, on budget, and on goal.
Custom views can be created, edited, copied, and combined, and saved into the organizer for reuse.
Earned value analysis (EVA) is set up in MS Project to view project costs.
MS Project can generate earned value reports and display earned value data in both task tables and resource tables.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this MS Project course cover?

It covers creating, editing, copying, and combining custom views for tables, copying views into the organizer, and setting up earned value analysis (EVA) to view project costs, including generating an earned value report and viewing task and resource tables for earned value.

What is earned value analysis in this course?

The course explains what an earned value analysis (EVA) is and how to set it up in MS Project to view your project costs, then how to create an earned value report and view task and resource data in EVA tables.

What skills will I gain from this course?

The course aligns with skills including Earned Value Management, Microsoft Enterprise Project Management, Project Accounting, Project Cost Management, Project Management, and Project Portfolio Management.

Will I learn how to reuse custom views across projects?

Yes. The course shows how to copy a custom view into the organizer so it can be used for future projects, and how to save a custom table.