help with microsoft project 2007

[nyla]

Hi all,

I have been given a project to outline on ms project and seeing as i
have never used it before, i have come along quite a way but i'm stuck
on a few things that i need help with:

1. If a task has a fixed duration, does that mean i would add a
'milestone' in there or is there another function to state this? i added
the milestones but now it looks funny with black diamonds everywhere and
no info!

2. In the resource field, if you have two members of staff working on
the task, on the chart it cos up as '200'% be default how can you edit
it so it says just '2'.

3.if i had 3 tasks say they were:

Task names: Duration:
order compnents 7days
order production equipment 14days
install production equipment 25 days
meeting 1 day

however, install production equipment must not start until 20 DAYS
AFTER order components has been Completed and 40 DAYS AFTER order
production equipment, how would i show this on my gantts chart how would
i add the extra days in? I tried using the 'lag' function and i got like
a 9mnth gap in between before the meeting, how can i reduce the gap
because it doent make sense!

Help would be much appreciated, thank you!!!!

 

[Dave]

Answers in-line.

Hi all,

I have been given a project to outline on ms project and seeing as i
have never used it before, i have come along quite a way but i'm stuck
on a few things that i need help with:

1. If a task has a fixed duration, does that mean i would add a
'milestone' in there or is there another function to state this? i added
the milestones but now it looks funny with black diamonds everywhere and
no info!

No, there is no particular reason why you would add a milestone after a
fixed duration task more than any other. In particular, fixed duration
does not mean fixed in time but fixed in the amount of time it takes to
execute the task.

If you want to see easily which tasks are fixed duration, you can add
the 'Type' column to the Gantt chart. You could also use some
conditional formatting to set those tasks a different colour if it was
really necessary, but I would question why you wanted to do that.

2. In the resource field, if you have two members of staff working on
the task, on the chart it cos up as '200'% be default how can you edit
it so it says just '2'.

Tools/Options/Schedule/Show assignment units as a decimal.

3.if i had 3 tasks say they were:

Task names: Duration:
order compnents 7days
order production equipment 14days
install production equipment 25 days
meeting 1 day

however, install production equipment must not start until 20 DAYS
AFTER order components has been Completed and 40 DAYS AFTER order
production equipment, how would i show this on my gantts chart how would
i add the extra days in? I tried using the 'lag' function and i got like
a 9mnth gap in between before the meeting, how can i reduce the gap
because it doent make sense!

I would link 'Order Components' to 'Install Production Equipment' with
an FS link and add a lag of 20 days to that link. You need to decide
whether the lag should be 20 working days or 20 calendar days (in which
case you would enter a lag of 20ed).

Similarly for the 40 day lag.

If there is a gap between the meeting and another task which isn't
because of a lag, then the delay must be because of other factors such as:
- Constraints (double-click the meeting and look at the advanced tab to
ensure it starts as soon as possible)
- Levelling may be automatic when it should be manual (Tools, level
resources, manual)
- Resource calendars (check when resources can work)
- Task calendars (double click the task and check that no calendar has
been assigned to it).

 

[nyla]

Thank you for that!


would also like to know how would i produce a summary of the costs of
the projects, including total costs.

And also what does it mean if your text is red on the resource sheet?
how do you overcome that?

Kind regards
nyla

 

[Dave]

Thank you for that!


would also like to know how would i produce a summary of the costs of
the projects, including total costs.

And also what does it mean if your text is red on the resource sheet?
how do you overcome that?

Kind regards
nyla

If you want to see the costs of your project you can right click on a
header in the left hand part of the screen and insert the cost column
(there are views that include this as well).

If you mean that you want to see the costs across a range of projects
then you can either use a resource pool (which is probably too involved
to outline here) or you can create a master project. To do this, open a
new project and from the insert menu select insert project. Then you
can see summary costs across a range of projects in the same way as
outlined above.

You can also see costs by resource/task by looking that the Task Usage
or Resource Usage view and right clicking on the right-hand part of the
view to include the cost row.

If the resource is in red it means they are overallocated at some point.
You will have to trawl through the time-phased data in the resource
view to find it. However it might not matter depending on what
granularity you are interested in. For example, if you are only
interested in doing what a resource does on a week-by-week or day-by-day
basis then you don't care what they do on a hour-by-hour basis. To set
that granularity go to tools, level resources and select day-by-day or
whatever suits you.

If you don't have any yellow diamonds in the info column of your
resource usage view then you aren't actually overallocated in terms of
your selected granularity.

 

[nyla]

thank you.

is there a way to make the network diagram appear bigger when printin
the pages off?

And also is there a way to only print off the left side of the page o
the gantts chart? (i.e the fields

 

[Dave]

thank you.

is there a way to make the network diagram appear bigger when printing
the pages off?

And also is there a way to only print off the left side of the page on
the gantts chart? (i.e the fields)

You can print the task list to print out the left hand side of the page.
This is selected from the view/more views menu.

Scaling factors can be applied to the network diagram from the page
setup menu.