Create a New Project

Quick reference

• 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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