Using Views and Tables

Quick reference

• 00:05 In this lesson, I'm going to talk about views.
• 00:07 Now, there's essentially four different ways to view
• 00:11 information 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.
• 00:21 There is another type of view, which is called the resources view.
• 00:27 And then, we also have reports and timelines.
• 00:30 I'm going to walk you through those right now.
• 00:33 The first thing I'm going to do is remove the software development plan area at
• 00:37 the top.
• 00:38 I'm using the project template that Microsoft provided.
• 00:42 And 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 move it up to the top,
• 00:50 we now just have the view being displayed.
• 00:53 Now, this view here is called Gantt chart.
• 00:56 I know that because it's displayed on the left hand side of the screen.
• 00:59 The Gantt chart is made up of two elements.
• 01:02 One is called the view.
• 01:04 So, the view is displaying this text on the left and the graphics on the right.
• 01:10 Then, there's a table, and
• 01:12 the table defines what columns of text get displayed.
• 01:17 So, let me explain.
• 01:18 If I click on the View tab, you can see I have Gantt chart selected.
• 01:24 And then, if I come over here to the data section, there's a tables picklist.
• 01:31 And here you can see I can choose to enter data in cost.
• 01:39 I can look at the schedule.
• 01:42 Work, and so on.
• 01:44 I'll go back to the default entry table.
• 01:47 So, the view is called the Gantt chart, and
• 01:50 the table displays 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.
• 02:01 So, for example, if I click network diagram Calendar,
• 02:06 it's always displaying the names of the tasks.
• 02:10 There's another type of view, and that's called the resource view.
• 02:13 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,
• 02:31 and what tasks they're assigned to on the right.
• 02:35 What we've looked at so far are what we call traditional views,
• 02:40 meaning there's task views and resource views.
• 02:43 If you open a book on Microsoft Project,
• 02:46 these are probably what's going to be talked about.
• 02:49 But there are two other types of views that I want to talk about.
• 02:52 And they may not be called views, but they really are.
• 02:56 And the first one we're going to talk about is the timeline view.
• 03:00 So, click the View tab, then click the Gantt chart.
• 03:03 This is going to bring us to our standard Gantt chart.
• 03:08 Now, you can see there's a lot of tasks here.
• 03:12 There's a lot of summary tasks with subtasks underneath them.
• 03:14 Asking someone to try and read this Gantt chart might become a little bit difficult.
• 03:20 So, sometimes you want to communicate what's going on in your project
• 03:25 by taking key elements of your project and displaying them for
• 03:29 a view that's maybe more focused just on communicating to management.
• 03:34 Or communicating to resource managers.
• 03:37 So, what you do is you click the View tab and click the timeline checkbox.
• 03:42 Now, you add tasks to the timeline, and
• 03:45 you can see it's actually very interactive.
• 03:48 This green bar here, I can move that around,
• 03:50 in order to move around the Gantt chart.
• 03:53 I can also stretch this out to see the entire Gantt chart.
• 03:57 But tasks are already on here.
• 03:59 Now, we started with the software development plan project template.
• 04:03 So, someone already put these tasks on here.
• 04:06 But to add a task yourself, just go ahead and find a task like this.
• 04:10 I'll right click,
• 04:15 and choose add to timeline.
• 04:22 Now, what I just did is I added this define preliminary resources task to
• 04:26 the timeline.
• 04:27 Now, the timeline is stretched out for the length of the project, but
• 04:29 you can see here this is the task, it's really hard to read.
• 04:30 So, I can just go ahead and click on this and drag it down with my mouse.
• 04:36 And now, I've called that task out.
• 04:40 Now, we don't want this to be too complicated.
• 04:42 So, if there's ever times when we think there's information we don't need
• 04:47 to display, we can always right click on this and say remove from timeline.
• 04:52 So maybe I want to bring this down.
• 04:54 This scope task over here is hard to see.
• 04:58 So, I can click and drag on that, and bring it up.
• 05:00 And then I could even move it over a little bit too.
• 05:03 So, that's the timeline view.
• 05:05 So, once again, you access that by clicking the View tab, and
• 05:09 then choosing the timeline checkbox.
• 05:11 The last view type I'm going to show you is the report view.
• 05:15 So, with the View tab selected, these select the timeline,
• 05:19 this way we have the whole page selected.
• 05:21 And click the Report tab.
• 05:23 And then, you can see there's a number of different built in reports that we can
• 05:28 select, that will show us information on our project.
• 05:31 We can create our own, and I'm going to show you that in future lessons.
• 05:34 But what I've shown you now is task views, resource views, the timeline, and reports.
• 05:41 And those all make up what I like to refer to as views in Microsoft Project.

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