Create Custom Fields

Quick reference

• 00:04 After a team meeting with the homeowner, they informed us that they're
• 00:08 concerned about the duration or the cost for the project going over 10%.
• 00:13 So as a project manager,
• 00:17 you wanna create some fields that represent those requirements.
• 00:23 Now, I can go ahead and insert a field like duration variance.
• 00:26 Let me go on and insert that column right now, duration variance.
• 00:31 And what you can see is it shows in days.
• 00:35 But what the homeowner wants is to see this in percentages.
• 00:39 That's where custom fields come in.
• 00:41 With custom fields you can create your own text fields, number fields, date fields.
• 00:47 And you can also create formula fields just as you would in Microsoft Excel.
• 00:53 Although it's a little bit more complicated than Excel, and I'm going to
• 00:56 show you why, and then I'm going to show you how to create the formula.
• 01:02 Before we create this duration variance formula
• 01:06 I need to show you some quirks inside of Microsoft Project.
• 01:10 So we're going to first create our custom field, click the Project tab,
• 01:14 locate the Properties section and click the Custom Fields icon.
• 01:21 We're going to create a custom number field, so choose type of Number and
• 01:26 make sure Task is selected.
• 01:28 We're going to use this number one field.
• 01:31 So these are all the empty fields that we can use.
• 01:34 We're going to start with number one, and we're going to type Rename,
• 01:38 click Rename, and call this Percent Duration Variance and click OK.
• 01:44 Next we'll click the Formula button.
• 01:47 Now here's the quirk I wanna show you.
• 01:50 I'm going to insert a field, choose Duration, choose
• 01:58 Baseline duration, and Baseline duration and click OK.
• 02:02 If you get any warning's it's just telling you that it's going to overwrite
• 02:07 data that might be in the number one field.
• 02:09 We've never used it so it's okay.
• 02:12 Click the OK button.
• 02:13 Now, first the field won't show, so we need to insert it.
• 02:18 And now you can see this 14,400, 9,600.
• 02:26 Well what's going on here?
• 02:27 Well, when Microsoft Project looks at one day,
• 02:31 it treats it as 480, that's just how it stores it.
• 02:35 So, if I really want to see what this value is I need to right click,
• 02:42 choose Custom Fields, choose Formula, and choose divide by 480.
• 02:49 And click OK.
• 02:51 So now you can see that the duration is being displayed properly.
• 02:55 Now, you might see these two fields, why are the different?
• 02:58 Well this is displaying the baseline duration,
• 03:01 and this is displaying our current duration.
• 03:04 If we recall in a previous lesson, we added ten days of duration.
• 03:07 So, this is actually accurate.
• 03:10 I'm now going to update this custom field one more time, so right click,
• 03:15 choose Custom Fields, choose Formula, and
• 03:20 I'm going to erase this value and paste in the formula.
• 03:25 Now the formula's provided in the exercise file if you don’t catch this.
• 03:28 You could also pause this lesson so you could write this down.
• 03:32 What it’s saying here, is if, and this is two letter I's, so that’s I-IF,
• 03:38 if the baseline duration is equal to zero, then just leave the value as zero.
• 03:43 Otherwise, calculate the percentage overage for the project.
• 03:48 Well, actually, it’s a percentage of the baseline duration and
• 03:52 the current duration.
• 03:54 Remember these divide by 40s are just there, because they have to be.
• 03:58 And what those do is it requires you to put things in extra parentheses as well.
• 04:04 So, we'll click the OK button, but before we click OK.
• 04:07 One of the things I wanna point out is, currently, our formula is only for tasks.
• 04:13 So projects tasks has option here that says,
• 04:16 how do you wanna calculate summary rows?
• 04:18 So that would be the Prepare a New House row, and
• 04:21 the My New House row as an example.
• 04:23 Choose Use Formula and click OK.
• 04:27 So now you can see we have a percentage.
• 04:29 There's 33% over for this task.
• 04:32 We're 13% over for the overall Prepare House Purchase and
• 04:37 we're 6% overall on our project as a whole.
• 04:43 I went ahead and used the same exact formula.
• 04:46 We just replaced the word duration with cost.
• 04:50 And now I have this Percent Cost Variance field that I created
• 04:54 using the number two field.
• 04:57 Now what you can see here is that this particular phase of work under
• 05:01 Prepare Home Purchase is overbudget, but the Build House is slightly under budget.
• 05:07 And if you recall the reason for that is because earlier, we asked the general
• 05:12 contractor to find a way to reduce the Purchase House Materials task.
• 05:18 In the next lesson, I’m going to show you how to take these formulas, and
• 05:22 turn them into graphical indicators.

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