Tips and Tricks for Copying Views

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About this lesson

When you create custom tables, reports, views, filters, and other custom items, you can copy these from one project to another. You can do this using the organizer.

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Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2019/365.

Quick reference

Tips and Tricks for Copying Views

When you create custom tables, reports, views, filters, and other custom items, you can copy these from one project to another. You can do this using the organizer.

Steps

To use the organizer, follow these steps:

  • Open the source project that contains items you want to share. Also, open the target project that you want to copy to.
  • Click the File tab, select the Info menu item, and then click the Organizer icon.
  • The organizer dialog appears. Select the source file at the bottom-left pick list, then select the target file in the bottom-right pick list.
  • Select a tab containing what you want to copy, and select the item to copy on the left. Click the Copy >> button to copy the item to the target file.
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  • 00:04 In this tips and tricks lesson, I'm going to show you how you can copy your views,
  • 00:09 reports and other information from one project to another.
  • 00:13 Now, right now I have my My New House project open.
  • 00:18 And if I click over here on the windows section, I have the View tab selected.
  • 00:25 I have the windows section.
  • 00:27 And you can see I have two projects open.
  • 00:30 There's the My New House project, and
  • 00:32 there's this new startup business plan project that I'm working on.
  • 00:37 I'll go back to my My New House project.
  • 00:40 So, now what I want to do is copy this report, maybe the calendar,
  • 00:45 perhaps some views and tables over to the other project.
  • 00:50 So, I go to the File tab, and in the File tab there's an info section.
  • 00:57 Locate the Organizer button and click that.
  • 01:02 Now, what you can do is copy information from one project to another.
  • 01:08 Now, this Global.MPT file, this is actually something that stores
  • 01:14 all of the things that you use continuously across multiple projects.
  • 01:19 So, if you always want a certain view, report,
  • 01:22 what have you to be standard in Microsoft Project, you can copy it here.
  • 01:27 What we're going to do is copy from My New House over to Startup business plan.
  • 01:35 We might as well copy over this My Milestone Report.
  • 01:39 So, select that and click the Copy button.
  • 01:42 Now, I also want to copy over the view that I created,
  • 01:48 and that view was the Homeowner View.
  • 01:52 Now, I might want to rename this after it gets into the other project, but just for
  • 01:56 purposes of demonstration, I'll go ahead and copy this over.
  • 02:00 Now, if you'll recall, the view comes with a table,
  • 02:04 we had to create the table that displayed the columns, and then we have the view.
  • 02:09 So we click on the tables tab here, and make sure we copy over the table as well.
  • 02:15 Finally, we could even copy over the calendar.
  • 02:19 Now, it says Standard here and it says Standard here.
  • 02:23 But remember, we added Holidays to our calendars.
  • 02:27 We can copy that over.
  • 02:28 And it will ask if we want to replace and you say yes.
  • 02:32 And now those holiday calendars have been moved to the new project.
  • 02:35 Same thing with fields.
  • 02:37 If we want to take over our custom fields with our graphical indicators,
  • 02:42 we can go ahead and copy those over too.
  • 02:45 Click the Close button, press Escape.
  • 02:50 Go to the View tab, and locate the other open project.
  • 02:59 Just to show you that this data is here, I can right click on duration, and
  • 03:03 insert column.
  • 03:04 And type PCT, and there's our duration, and cost variance fields.
  • 03:10 They should be grey right now because there is no baseline.
  • 03:14 I can click on the Report tab, choose Custom.
  • 03:18 And there's the My Milestone Report.
  • 03:21 And now,
  • 03:21 the My Milestone Report sis showing milestones specific to this project.
  • 03:27 I could also click the task tab, click on Gantt chart, and
  • 03:31 there's my homeowner view with those fields that we created earlier.
  • 03:36 So, basically it's very straightforward to copy information or
  • 03:41 copy your settings, if you will, from one project to another.
  • 03:46 The trick is to make sure both projects are open at the same time.
  • 03:50 Now, unlike Microsoft Word and PowerPoint where you can open up multiple
  • 03:54 windows of that application, you can't with Project.
  • 03:58 So, in order to access one project in another,
  • 04:01 you always have to go to the View tab and use this window section.
  • 04:05 There's a number of other options here, such as clicking Arrange All, so
  • 04:09 you can see both projects at the same time.
  • 04:12 But the way to maneuver between both projects is by clicking this pick list.
  • 04:17 So, remember the organizer is very important for
  • 04:20 you if you want to move Settings, views, custom fields over from one to another.
  • 04:26 And that again is located in the File tab and in the Info section, and
  • 04:30 you can use the organizer.

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