Create Custom Fields

Quick reference

• 00:04 After a team meeting with the homeowner, they informed us that they're
• 00:09 concerned about the duration or the cost for the project going over 10%.
• 00:14 So as a project manager,
• 00:16 you want to create some fields that represent those requirements.
• 00:21 Now, I can go ahead and insert a field like duration variance.
• 00:25 Let me go in and insert that column right now, Duration Variance.
• 00:30 And what you can see is it shows in days.
• 00:33 But what the homeowner wants is to see this in percentages,
• 00:37 that's where custom fields come in.
• 00:40 With custom fields, you can create your own text fields, number fields,
• 00:45 date fields.
• 00:46 And you can also create formula fields, just as you would in Microsoft Excel.
• 00:51 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.
• 01:00 Before we create this duration variance formula,
• 01:03 I need to show you some quirks inside of Microsoft Project.
• 01:07 So we're going to first create our custom field.
• 01:10 Click the Project tab, locate the Properties section and
• 01:14 click the Custom Fields icon.
• 01:16 We're going to create a custom number field, so
• 01:20 choose type of Number, and make sure Task is selected.
• 01:24 We're going to use this Number1 field, so
• 01:27 these are all the empty fields that we can use.
• 01:29 We're going to start with Number1, and we're going to click Rename,
• 01:35 and call this Percent Duration Variance, and click OK.
• 01:40 Next we'll click the Formula button.
• 01:43 Now here's the quirk I want to show you,
• 01:47 I'm going to insert a field, choose Duration
• 01:52 > Baseline Duration > Baseline Duration > OK.
• 01:58 If you get any warnings, it's just telling you that it's going to overwrite data that
• 02:02 might be in the Number1 field.
• 02:03 We've never used it so it's okay, click the OK button.
• 02:07 Now first the field won't show, so we need to insert it.
• 02:14 And now you can see this 14,400, 9,600, well, what's going on here?
• 02:20 Well, when Microsoft Project looks at 1 day,
• 02:24 it treats it as 480, that's just how it stores it.
• 02:28 So if I really want to see what this value is,
• 02:34 I need to right click > Custom Fields
• 02:38 > Formula > Divide by 480 > OK.
• 02:43 So now you can see that the duration is being displayed properly.
• 02:48 Now you might see these two fields, why are they different?
• 02:50 Well, this is displaying the baseline duration, and
• 02:54 this is displaying our current duration.
• 02:56 If we recall, in a previous lesson we added ten days of duration, so
• 03:01 this is actually accurate.
• 03:03 I'm now going to update this custom field one more time,
• 03:08 so right-click > Custom Fields > Formula.
• 03:12 And I'm going to erase this value and paste in the formula.
• 03:17 Now the formula is provided in the exercise file, if you don't catch this.
• 03:21 You could also pause this lesson, so you could write this down.
• 03:25 What it's saying here is if, and this is two letter iis, so that's iif,
• 03:30 if the baseline duration is equal to zero, then just leave the value is zero.
• 03:35 Otherwise, calculate the percentage overage for the project, well,
• 03:40 actually it's a percentage of the baseline duration and the current duration.
• 03:46 Remember these divided by 40s are just there because they have to be, and
• 03:51 what those do is it requires you to put things in extra parentheses as well.
• 03:56 So we'll click the OK button.
• 03:58 But before we click OK,
• 04:00 one of the things I want to point out is currently our formula is only for tasks.
• 04:05 So project has this option here that says, how do you want to calculate summary rows?
• 04:11 So that would be the prepare new house row and
• 04:14 the my new house row as an example, choose Use Formula and click OK.
• 04:19 So now you can see we have a percentage, there's 33% over for
• 04:24 this task, we're 13% over for the overall prepare house purchase,
• 04:31 and we're 6% overall on our project as a whole.
• 04:35 I went ahead and used the same exact formula, but
• 04:39 just replaced the word duration with cost.
• 04:43 And now I have this present cost variance field that I created
• 04:47 using the Number2 field.
• 04:49 Now what you can see here is that this particular phase of work under Prepare
• 04:54 home purchase is over budget, but the Build house is slightly under budget.
• 05:00 And if you recall the reason for that is because earlier we asked the general
• 05:05 contractor to find a way to reduce the Purchase house materials task.
• 05:11 In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to take these formulas and
• 05:14 turn them into graphical indicators.

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