Working with the Reporting Module

Quick reference

• 00:04 To visualize your project, Microsoft gives you lots of graphical
• 00:08 views such as the Gantt chart, graphical indicators and the timeline.
• 00:12 However, there might be a time when you just wanna communicate the status of
• 00:16 the project with your own custom report.
• 00:19 So Microsoft introduced the report module in Project 2013 and
• 00:23 I'll show you how you can create your own reports in this lesson.
• 00:26 Before you start working with reports,
• 00:29 you should know that it takes up a lot of screen real estate.
• 00:32 So we should really remove the timeline, any split views that we have.
• 00:36 So click the View tab, deselect Timeline and
• 00:40 if you have this Details check box selected, de-select that too.
• 00:44 So all we should see at this point is the Gantt Chart.
• 00:47 Click the Report tab.
• 00:49 Microsoft has provided some built-in reports for us.
• 00:52 So, for example,
• 00:53 if we click the Costs pick list, we can choose Resource Cost Overview.
• 00:59 And this shows us the cost for
• 01:00 each one of our resources, broken down in several ways.
• 01:05 There's another good report that you can open if you click the Report tab again and
• 01:10 choose In Progress.
• 01:12 Here's a milestone report.
• 01:15 Here you'll see a list of all the milestones that are late, up next,
• 01:19 or completed.
• 01:21 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
• 01:29 all milestones, independent of whether they're late, up next, or completed.
• 01:35 Creating a report starts with clicking the Report tab.
• 01:39 Locate the New Report picklist, and choose Blank and
• 01:45 type My Milestone Report, and click the OK button.
• 01:52 This creates a blank canvas in which we can draw our report.
• 01:58 So with the Report Tools Design tab selected, click the table icon.
• 02:05 The table icon will insert a table.
• 02:08 And it says my new house.
• 02:09 This is basically the project summary task.
• 02:13 We need to access the field list.
• 02:14 So if you can't see that right now, make sure the Table Tools Design
• 02:19 tab is selected and then in the show/hide section, there's Table Data.
• 02:24 You can choose that to make sure the field list is selected.
• 02:30 What we wanna do is choose this filter here that says all tasks and
• 02:34 change that to one of the predefined filters called Milestones.
• 02:39 Now the milestones aren't listed right now.
• 02:42 Why is that?
• 02:43 Well it turns out it's always grouped by project summary task to start.
• 02:48 So in the Outline level, choose the pick list and say All Subtasks.
• 02:53 Now we're filtering for milestones and just showing all of them.
• 02:58 We can click this Show Hierarchy check box and
• 03:01 that will show us how the milestones are indented in the work breakdown structure,
• 03:05 but that's looking a little too cluttered on the screen, so deselect that.
• 03:09 By default, these are sorted from beginning to end,
• 03:12 but you could also change the sort order.
• 03:15 Now, we don't wanna see the percent complete field.
• 03:17 We actually wanna see the actual finish date.
• 03:21 So, let's first locate that percent complete field,
• 03:24 in this list of records, in this list of fields.
• 03:29 Deselect Percent Complete, and notice how it automatically changes for
• 03:33 you on the screen.
• 03:34 Then move up and
• 03:37 locate Actual Finish.
• 03:42 Now we don't have any milestones that are done yet.
• 03:45 But when they are it will show the actual finish date for them.
• 03:50 Now we might wanna go ahead and make some other minor modifications.
• 03:54 I'm gonna move this table up a little bit.
• 03:56 I might also wanna change the color and then I might wanna
• 04:01 put a little heading over here, just to clarify what this is showing.
• 04:05 So click the Tools design tab.
• 04:09 Notice there's two design tabs so make sure report tools design tab is selected.
• 04:12 Choose shapes.
• 04:15 Choose rectangle.
• 04:18 And draw a rectangle.
• 04:21 And say, all project milestones.
• 04:27 And now come over here to the task tab and change the fill color so
• 04:31 it matches something close to the table.
• 04:35 And that's all it takes to build a report.
• 04:38 It's automatically saved in your project at this point.
• 04:42 The next time you save your project, it'll always be there.
• 04:45 To access it, click the report tab, click the custom dropdown.
• 04:50 And you'll locate the My Milestone Report.
• 04:55 As you can see, the reporting module is very straightforward.
• 04:58 If you have the Report Tools Design tab open, you can also insert charts,
• 05:05 and they're pretty much any kind of chart that you'd choose if you were using Excel.
• 05:10 You can choose tasks and resources.
• 05:13 You can select the fields you want, filter the data, group the data, and
• 05:18 sort the data.
• 05:19 Just like you would in the table.
• 05:22 I'm going to remove this chart.
• 05:25 There's one last thing that I'm going to show you here.
• 05:27 Which is that you can copy the report.
• 05:29 And if you click copy the report,
• 05:31 it automatically copies it into the clipboard, and
• 05:34 you can paste that into the PowerPoint just like we did with the timeline.

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