Working with the Reporting Module

Quick reference

• 00:04 To visualize your project, Microsoft gives you lots of graphical views,
• 00:08 such as the Gantt Chart, Graphical Indicators, and the Timeline.
• 00:12 However, there might be a time when you just want to communicate the status of
• 00:16 the project with your own custom report.
• 00:18 So Microsoft introduced the report module in Project 2013, and
• 00:22 I'll show you how you can create your own reports in this lesson.
• 00:26 Before you start working with reports,
• 00:28 you should know that it takes up a lot of screen real estate.
• 00:31 So we should really remove the Timeline, any split views that we have.
• 00:35 So click the View tab, deselect Timeline, and
• 00:39 if you have this Details checkbox selected, deselect that too.
• 00:43 So all we should see at this point is a Gantt Chart.
• 00:46 Click the Report tab, Microsoft has provided some built in reports for us.
• 00:52 So for example, if we click the Costs pick list,
• 00:56 we can choose Resource Cost Overview.
• 00:59 And this shows us the cost for each one of our resources broken down in several ways.
• 01:04 There's another good report that you can open.
• 01:06 If you click the Report tab again and
• 01:09 choose In Progress, here's a Milestone Report.
• 01:14 Here you'll see a list of all the Milestones that are late, up next,
• 01:19 or completed.
• 01:20 Notice how the Milestone Report does not list all the Milestones in your project.
• 01:25 I'm going to show you how to build a Milestone Report that lists all
• 01:29 Milestones independent of whether they're late, up next, or completed.
• 01:33 Creating a report starts with clicking the Report tab.
• 01:38 Locate the New Report pick list, and choose Blank and
• 01:45 type My Milestone Report and click the OK button.
• 01:51 This creates a blank canvas on which we can draw our report.
• 01:56 So with the Report Tools Design tab selected,
• 02:02 click the Table icon.
• 02:05 The Table icon will insert a table and it says My New House.
• 02:09 This is basically the project summary task.
• 02:11 We need to access the field list, so if you can't see that right now,
• 02:16 make sure the Table Tools Design tab is selected.
• 02:19 And then in the Show/Hide section, there's Table Data.
• 02:23 You can choose that to make sure the Field List is selected.
• 02:27 What we want to do is choose this filter here that says All Tasks.
• 02:31 And change that to one of the predefined filters called Milestones.
• 02:38 Now the Milestones aren't listed right now, why is that?
• 02:41 Well, it turns out, it's always grouped by Project Summary tasks to start.
• 02:45 So in the Outline Level, choose the pick list and say All Subtasks.
• 02:51 Now we're filtering from Milestones and just showing all of them.
• 02:55 We can click this Show Hierarchy checkbox and
• 02:58 that will show us how the Milestones are indented in the work breakdown structure.
• 03:03 But that's looking a little too cluttered on the screen, so deselect that.
• 03:06 By default, these are sorted from beginning to end, but
• 03:10 you could also change the sort order.
• 03:12 Now we don't want to see the % Complete fields,
• 03:15 we actually want to see the Actual Finish date.
• 03:18 So let's first locate that % Complete field in
• 03:22 those list of records, in this list of fields.
• 03:27 Deselect % Complete and notice how it automatically changes for
• 03:32 you on the screen.
• 03:33 Then move up and locate Actual Finish.
• 03:35 Now we don't have any Milestones that are done yet,
• 03:41 but when they are, it will show the actual finish date for them.
• 03:48 Now we might want go ahead and make some other minor modifications.
• 03:52 I'm going to move this table up a little bit.
• 03:54 I might also want to change the color.
• 03:58 And then I might want to put a little heading over here just to clarify what
• 04:02 this is showing.
• 04:03 So click the Report Tools Design tab.
• 04:07 Notice there's two design tabs, so make sure Report Tools Design tab is selected.
• 04:11 Choose Shapes, choose rectangle,
• 04:17 and draw a rectangle and
• 04:20 say All Project Milestones.
• 04:25 And now come over here to the Task tab and change the fill color so
• 04:30 it matches something close to the table.
• 04:33 And that's all it takes to build a report.
• 04:35 It's automatically saved in your project at this point.
• 04:39 The next time you save your project, it'll always be there.
• 04:42 To access it, click the Report tab, click the Custom drop down,
• 04:48 and you'll locate the My Milestone Report.
• 04:52 As you can see, the reporting module is very straightforward.
• 04:56 If you have the Report Tools Design tab open, you can also insert Charts.
• 05:03 And they're pretty much any kind of chart that you'd choose if you were using Excel.
• 05:07 You can choose Tasks and Resources, you can select the fields you want,
• 05:13 filter the data, group the data, and sort the data just like you would in the table.
• 05:19 I'm going to remove this chart.
• 05:21 And there's one last thing that I'm going to show you here,
• 05:24 which is that you can copy the report.
• 05:26 And if you click Copy the Report,
• 05:29 it automatically copies it into the clipboard and
• 05:34 you can paste that into PowerPoint, just like we did with the Timeline.

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