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About this lesson
Before you create a new project, make sure you have all the project options configured as you want them. Unless you have a unique reason to do otherwise, it is a good practice to start with a blank project.
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2013, 2019/365.
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Create a New Project.mpp223 KB Create a New Project - Completed.mpp
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Quick reference
Create a New Project
Before you create a new project, make sure you have all the project options configured as you want them. If you will recall from the previous lesson, project options are accessible from the File tab and selecting the Options menu item.
Unless you have a unique reason to do otherwise, it is a good practice to start with a blank project.
Steps
To set up your first project, follow these steps:
- Verify all the project options are configured as you want them. See the previous lesson for recommended settings.
- Create a new blank project.
- Adjust the layout of the Gantt chart entry table so it looks the way you want. For example, stretch out the task name field, make sure the start and finish dates are visible, and move the predecessors column closer to the task name column.
- Click the Project tab and then click the Project Information icon.
- Before you start adding tasks, save your project and verify the new project name displays in the project summary task (task level zero).
- 00:04 From here on in we're going to work with a project that we create together.
- 00:10 Now before we get started it's important to make sure that
- 00:14 you are in the same places I am.
- 00:16 So if you have any projects open in Microsoft Project I recommend you
- 00:20 close them now.
- 00:22 Save them if you feel that you need to save them.
- 00:24 I would recommend that you exit Microsoft Project and start Microsoft Project anew
- 00:30 so that you have this screen right here, which is the new back stage.
- 00:35 Go ahead and click on Blank Project and
- 00:39 this will bring us to a brand new project.
- 00:43 Now if you have the options turned on, just like we defined in the previous
- 00:48 lesson, then you should have Task level zero displayed and you should
- 00:53 see a New Task or Auto Scheduled option at the bottom of the screen.
- 00:59 If you don't have these, then I suggest you go back to the previous lesson and
- 01:04 configure Microsoft Project before going any further.
- 01:07 One of the first things I like to do,
- 01:09 is give myself some more real estate to start working on my project.
- 01:12 So the first thing I’m going to do is locate the splitter bar between
- 01:17 the Gantt Chart table and the Gantt Chart graphic.
- 01:21 So I’ll go ahead and click my mouse and hold onto that, and drag it to the right.
- 01:26 We can always bring that back later.
- 01:29 There, this gives us some more space to work with when we're creating our project.
- 01:34 The first thing that I'm going to do is stretch out this Task Name column.
- 01:38 So I find my mouse over here on the Task Name and mouse to the right
- 01:42 until I get this bar here that allows me to resize the Task Name column.
- 01:48 So I'll go ahead and just stretch that out.
- 01:50 This shouldn't be too long because you don't want your tasks to be too long.
- 01:55 But certainly, before I only had about ten characters,
- 01:58 this gives me a little bit more space to do my text entry.
- 02:04 Now you'll also notice that there's a Start and Finish column and
- 02:07 these dates are cut off.
- 02:08 So let's go ahead and stretch those out.
- 02:11 Now I can just come over here and mouse over and stretch the column as I need to.
- 02:17 But a faster option, and this is something you can do in Project and in Excel,
- 02:23 is just bring your mouse over here to this resize area and double click and
- 02:28 it will resize to the text that's displayed on the screen.
- 02:34 Now speaking of the Start and
- 02:35 Finish column, we try to never enter text into Start and Finish.
- 02:40 We let Microsoft Project drive the dates
- 02:44 by way of linking tasks with the Predecessors column.
- 02:47 So we're going to add some Tasks, add the Duration,
- 02:51 and then let the Predecessors column drive the dates.
- 02:55 So why not put Predecessors next to duration?
- 02:58 So click on the Predecessors column, so it's highlighted like this.
- 03:03 And then take the column heading and drag and drop that between Duration and Start.
- 03:10 So this what our screen should look like now.
- 03:13 We should have a Task name, a Duration, Predecessors,
- 03:17 Start, Finish, Resource Names, and then the Gantt Chart off to the right.
- 03:23 Now that we have the project looking the way we want,
- 03:26 we should turn our attention to the project information.
- 03:30 So to get to the project information, we'll click the Project tab,
- 03:33 we'll locate the Properties section, and then find the Project information icon.
- 03:39 Go ahead and click the project Information icon.
- 03:43 And here you can see we can set the Start date for our project.
- 03:47 I'm going to set the Start date for my project to be October 5th, 2015.
- 03:57 Notice there's a number of other options as well.
- 04:00 We can choose the Calendar, and we'll take a look at that in the next lesson.
- 04:05 And we can also set the Schedule from.
- 04:08 And Schedule from allows us to choose the Project Start Date or
- 04:12 the Project Finish Date.
- 04:14 So what does this mean?
- 04:16 Well let's say, for example that we were preparing for a large trade show event,
- 04:22 and we have to have everything open and ready by a certain day.
- 04:27 I can start my project by scheduling it from the Finish Date and
- 04:31 work my way backwards, but generally speaking, you
- 04:36 set the project Start Date and then you work your way forward in your planning.
- 04:41 So go ahead and make sure that you set the Start Date however you would like to and
- 04:46 set the Schedule from to Project Start Date.
- 04:50 Click the OK button.
- 04:52 Note how the Start Date has changed from the current date when we started the blank
- 04:57 project to now the new Start Date, which is, in my case, 10/5/2015.
- 05:05 So the next thing to do is to save our project.
- 05:08 Now this project is going to create a brand new house.
- 05:11 So we're going to call this project my new house.
- 05:14 So click the File Tab, choose Save As> Documents,
- 05:19 and change the file name to My New House, and click the Save button.
- 05:27 Now, you'll see the task name at task level zero changed to My New House.
- 05:31 So, this will always change to the file name that you save.
- 05:35 To wrap up, when we create a project,
- 05:37 we always make sure that our project options are configured, so for example,
- 05:41 task level zero was displayed, and new tasks are auto scheduled.
- 05:46 We set the Project Information.
- 05:49 And then in the next lesson, I'll talk about setting up calendars, and
- 05:53 then creating a project schedule.
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