Locked lesson.
About this lesson
The reporting module contains most of the capabilities you can use in Microsoft Excel.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
2013, 2019/365.
Exercise files
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Working with the Reporting Module.mpp399.5 KB Working with the Reporting Module - Completed.mpp
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Quick reference
Working with the Reporting Module
The reporting module is new for Microsoft Project 2013 and contains most of the capabilities you can use in Microsoft Excel. There are a number of built-in reports, but you can build your own. If you take special care in the design, you can print the reports onto a single page. You can even output the entire -- or portions -- of the report to PowerPoint using the copy/paste method.
Steps
To access reports, follow these steps:
- Click the Report tab.
- In the View Reports section, select various reports using the reporting icons.
- To create your own report, click the New Report icon and then select the appropriate report type you want to start with from the picklist.
- 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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