Using Views and Tables

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this lesson I'm going to talk about views.
• 00:08 Now, there's essentially four different ways to view information
• 00:12 in Microsoft Project.
• 00:14 There is the traditional view and
• 00:17 that's like this Gantt chart view down below here on this screen.
• 00:23 There's another type of view which is called a resource view.
• 00:27 And then we also have reports and timelines.
• 00:31 I'm gonna walk you through those right now.
• 00:33 The first thing I'm going to do is remove this software development plan
• 00:37 area at the top.
• 00:38 I'm using the project template that Microsoft provided and
• 00:42 I'm using the same one that I used in the previous lesson.
• 00:46 So if I take this little splitter view here and
• 00:48 move it up to the top we now just have the view being displayed.
• 00:54 This view here is called Gantt Chart.
• 00:56 I know that because it's displayed on the left-hand side of the screen.
• 01:00 The Gantt Chart is made up of two elements.
• 01:03 One is called the view, so
• 01:04 the view is displaying this text on the left and the graphics on the right.
• 01:10 Then there is a table and
• 01:12 the table defines what columns of text get displayed.
• 01:18 So let me explain.
• 01:19 If I click on the View tab, you can see I have Gantt Chart selected.
• 01:27 And then if I come over here to the data section, there is a tables pick list,
• 01:33 and here you can see, I can choose to enter data in cost,
• 01:39 I can look at the schedule, work and so on.
• 01:45 I'll go back to the default entry table.
• 01:48 So the view is called the Gantt chart and
• 01:50 the table display is the columns that get displayed.
• 01:54 There are two types of views.
• 01:56 There's task views and this displays any information relating to the task.
• 02:02 So, for example, if I click Network Diagram,
• 02:05 Calendar, it's always displaying the names of the tasks.
• 02:11 There's another type of view, and that's called the Resource View.
• 02:15 And the Resource View allows me to see resource-related information.
• 02:19 So, for example, if I click on this Resource Sheet button, icon,
• 02:23 you can see the list of resources in the project.
• 02:27 If I click on team planner, I can see the list of resources on the left and
• 02:32 what tasks they're assigned to on the right.
• 02:38 What we've looked at so far are what we call traditional views,
• 02:42 meaning there's task views and resources views.
• 02:46 If you open a book on Microsoft Project These are probably what's going to be
• 02:50 talked about.
• 02:51 But there are two other types of views that I wanna talk about.
• 02:54 And they may not be called views, but they really are.
• 02:58 And the first one we're going to talk about its the timeline view.
• 03:03 So click the view tab, then click the Gantt chart.
• 03:07 This is going to bring us to our standard Gantt chart.
• 03:11 Now you can see there's a lot of tasks here.
• 03:13 There's a lot of summary tasks with subtasks underneath them.
• 03:18 Asking someone to try and read this Gantt chart might become a little bit difficult.
• 03:24 So sometimes you want to communicate what's going on in your project by taking
• 03:29 key elements of your project and displaying them for
• 03:33 a view that's maybe more focused just on communicating to management or
• 03:38 communicating to resource managers.
• 03:41 So, what you do is you click the view tab, and click the timeline check box.
• 03:46 Now, you add tasks to the timeline, and
• 03:48 you can see it's actually very interactive, there's a screen bar here,
• 03:52 I can move that around in order to move around the Gantt chart.
• 03:56 I can also stretch this out to see the entire Gantt chart.
• 04:00 But tasks are already on here.
• 04:01 Now, we've started with the software development plan project template, so
• 04:06 someone already put these tasks on here.
• 04:09 But to add a task yourself, just go ahead and
• 04:12 find the task, like this, I'll right click and choose add to timeline.
• 04:18 Now what I just did is I added this define
• 04:21 preliminary resources task to the timeline.
• 04:25 Now the timeline is stretched out for the length of the project, but
• 04:29 you can see here, this is the task.
• 04:31 It's really hard to read.
• 04:33 So I can just go ahead and click on this and
• 04:36 drag it down with my mouse and now I've called that task out.
• 04:43 Now we don't want this to be too complicated, so if there's ever times when
• 04:46 we think there's information we don't need to display,
• 04:50 we can always right click on this and say remove from timeline.
• 04:55 So maybe I want to bring this down.
• 04:58 This sculp task over here is hard to see.
• 05:00 So i can click and drag on that, and bring it up, and
• 05:04 then I could even move it over a little bit too.
• 05:07 So, that's the timeline view.
• 05:09 So, once again, you access that by clicking the view tab, and
• 05:12 then choosing the timeline check box.
• 05:17 The last view type I'm gonna show you is the report view.
• 05:22 So with the view top selected, deselect the timeline,
• 05:25 this way we have the whole page selected, and click the report tab.
• 05:29 And then you can see there's a number of different built in reports
• 05:32 that we can select that will show us information on our project.
• 05:36 We can create our own and I'm gonna show you that in future lessons.
• 05:40 But what I've shown you now is task views, resource views, the timeline, and
• 05:46 reports, and those all make up what I like to refer to as views in Microsoft project.

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