Project 2016 for Beginners

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

 Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Course Introduction

Course Introduction .............................................................................................................6

Acquiring Project .................................................................................................................7

Course Review ...................................................................................................................11

What’s New in Project 2016 ..............................................................................................14

Chapter 2 – Workspace, the Ribbon and Help

The Project 2016 Workspace .............................................................................................16

Online Help ........................................................................................................................21

Ribbon and Toolbars ..........................................................................................................24

Status Bar ...........................................................................................................................28

Keyboard Shortcuts and Key Tips .....................................................................................30

Chapter 3 – Using Touch

Overview of Principles ......................................................................................................32

Chapter 4 – Project Options

Overview of Project Options .............................................................................................35

Chapter 5 – Task Basics

Entering Tasks ...................................................................................................................40

Opening and Closing Projects ............................................................................................43

Exercise 01 .........................................................................................................................46

Task Properties...................................................................................................................47

Chapter 6 – Subtasks

Subtasks .............................................................................................................................50

Exercise 02 .........................................................................................................................54

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Chapter 7 – Dependencies, Deadlines and Milestones

Linking and Unlinking Tasks.............................................................................................55

Setting Constraints and Deadlines .....................................................................................59

Setting Milestones ..............................................................................................................63

Exercise 03 .........................................................................................................................66

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Chapter 1 – Course Introduction

Video: Course Introduction

Toby: Hello and welcome to our course on Microsoft Project 2016. My name is Toby and I’m
your instructor on this course.

If you’ve studied Microsoft Project with Simon Sez IT before you will have used one of the
courses that I prepared and presented. There’s a batch of four there. Project 2010, there’s a
beginner and intermediate course and there’s an advanced course, and Project 2013, again a
beginner and intermediate course and an advanced course.

My background is in project management. Not only have I been a project management instructor
for quite a few years but I worked in a major European university in the Center for Project
Management preparing the first distance learning Master’s degree in Project Management. That
was a few years ago now. I’ve taught Microsoft Project in classrooms many, many times. And
my own experience extends to work in both the private and public sectors in the UK. So I’ve
done a couple of major projects for the UK government as well as a number of projects for
primarily financial institutions in the UK, a couple of the major banks, and also some projects for
major retailers.

I mentioned just now that you may well have studied Microsoft Project with Simon Sez IT
before. I am going to assume on this course that you have pretty much no knowledge of
Microsoft Project. This really is a course that is aimed primarily at people who are new to using
Microsoft Project. If you have used it before you may find that some of the early sections involve
material that you’re pretty familiar with. But particularly for the first two or three sections I do
suggest that you go through them because in those I’ll cover some of the main aspects of Project
2016 that may be different from the version of Project that you’re used to. And I’ll also cover
things like what’s new in Project 2016.

If you are completely new to Microsoft Project and I appreciate that many of you will be, I will
be assuming that you’re familiar with Windows software. So you know how to do things like
Copy and Paste. To some extent I’ll assume that you may have used the Microsoft Ribbon
before, although I will explain it just in case you haven’t. And in particular I will assume that
you have a good basic knowledge of project management itself. So you’ll know what I mean
when I talk about things like Schedule and Resources and overallocation.

If you don’t understand some of those basic concepts in project management you probably need
to cover a bit of basic material on project management in general first before you go through this
course because the course does very much rely on a reasonable knowledge of what’s involved in
managing a project.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

One thing I’m not going to do is to assume that we’re managing projects in a particular field. My
field has always tended to be IT, one way or another. But in fact the main sample projects that
I’m going to use on this course don’t really have anything to do with IT at all. We’re going to
refit a bathroom, or rather you are, and I’m going to organize a wedding. Neither of those have
anything in particular to do with IT.

What you can see here is the Project Professional 2016 start screen. You may well never have
seen this screen before. If you already have Microsoft Project 2016 installed, that is either the
standard version or the professional version, and the professional version includes Project Pro for
Office 365, but very importantly a desktop version. We’re not talking about Project Online.
We’re talking about desktop software here. If you have one of those products installed as a
desktop product on the device you’re going to use then you can skip the next section because
what I’m going to cover in the next section is how to acquire Project 2016 if you don’t already
have it.

After we cover that in the next section, the section after that I’m going to talk about the structure
of the course and in particular I’m going to start to talk about the projects that we’re going to
work through as we’re working through the course.

So if you already have Project 2016 installed you can skip the next section and go straight to the
one after that where I’m going to talk about the structure of the course. For those of you who
don’t have Project 2016 already you need to go through the next section with me and I’ll explain
to you what the options are.

That’s it for this section. I’ll see you then.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Acquiring Project 2016

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I want to talk about the versions of Microsoft Project that are available. And for
those of you who don’t yet have Microsoft Project installed I recommend the version or versions
that are most appropriate for use on this course. I’ll also talk briefly about acquiring and
installing Project 2016.

Now one thing that you’ll hear me say quite a bit on courses about Microsoft products is that I’m
looking at a page on Microsoft.com here and it’s probably going to be different by the time you
come to look at it. They change these pages on a very regular basis, which is in itself fine but it
means that I need you to basically search for the equivalent of this page if you want to get the
latest information.

Now what’s important about this page is that it shows us the main project products. And two
categories of products are really not relevant to this course. I don’t really cover these at all on the
course. So at the time of recording this course if you look at the category on the left there, 14
members, there’s a product called Project Light. Now that is not part of this course. It’s to do
with people submitting time sheets, recording progress on tasks and so on. But it’s a very, as the
name implies, light version of Microsoft Project. And we’re not going to look at that at all.

On the right hand side there are two other products, Project Online and Project Server, and we
don’t cover either of those on this course either. Project Online is, again as the name implies, an
online version of Microsoft Project. It has at the moment considerably less functionality than the
desktop products, although I do believe that over time its functionality will increase. And Project
Server is a server based product that can be used for managing programs of work and for pulling
together information and for resource management and so on across a whole batch, a whole
portfolio of projects and programs.

Now we don’t cover either of those on this course. What we’re covering on this course is desktop
Microsoft Project.

Now having said that and if you look at the center column there there appear to be two products.
There’s Project Pro for Office 365 and Project Standard. Now in effect the top one there is really
two products. It’s Project Pro for Office 365 and what we generally call Project Professional.
And the difference is, and believe me it isn’t much of a difference, that Project Pro for Office
365 is Project Professional which is effectively distributed using Office 365. And in fact on this
course I’m going to be using Project Pro for Office 365. I have an Office 365 subscription that
includes Microsoft Project. And with that I download a desktop version of Project Pro. And it’s
that desktop version of Project Pro that I’m going to be using on the course.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

There is another Microsoft Project product called Project Standard which is a sort of cut down
Project Professional. Some people say that Project Professional is the professional version of
Project Standard. I’m not sure it matters which way around you look at it really. But the
important thing is this. As a basic to intermediate learner of Microsoft Project either Project
Standard or Project Professional will do you absolutely fine.

Now to be fair there are one or two things in Project Professional that aren’t in Project Standard
that I will just sort of touch on on the course but they’re not enough to mean that you can’t get by
perfectly well with Project Standard.

So basically for this course you need Project Standard or Project Professional or Project Pro for
Office 365 with Microsoft Project downloaded to your desktop.

And if I had to recommend one of those products I’d recommend the last two because they’re
pretty much the same, Project Professional and Project Pro for Office 365 and certainly as far as
this course is concerned those two products are the same.

Now let me talk briefly about acquiring one of these versions of Project. If I go to the Project Pro
for Office 365 link first, in the UK you can add it to an Office 365 subscription. As far as I know
you can add it to an Office 365 subscription anywhere that you can get and use an Office 365
subscription. There may or may not be tax to pay, etcetera but that price which is equivalent
including tax to about £20 per user per month in the UK. I think it comes out to about $30 in the
U.S. including taxes. That’s a typical sort of monthly price for Project Pro for Office 365. Very
importantly there is a Try for Free button, a Try Now option. It used to be the case with
Microsoft Project that a free trial was a 60 day free trial. I think that generally at the moment it’s
a 30 day free trial. But provided you can sort of devote enough time to it hopefully that will be
enough time for you to work your way through this course to give you a chance to decide
whether Project is for you and whether you’re prepared to start paying that amount of money.

Let me go back and let’s now go to Project Standard. This is the purchase option for Project
Standard. It’s actually quite an expensive product. That’s the Microsoft price. If you buy it from
your local computer store, if they stock Microsoft Project, or buy from your favorite online
retailer you may pay a slightly lower price than that but in my recent experience the pricing on
legitimate copies of Microsoft Project doesn’t really vary that much. And Project Professional of
course is more expensive than that. And in fact there is Project Professional 2016 on the UK
store.

So there are your choices for actually acquiring Microsoft Project. Before you get started on
installing Microsoft Project, in fact ideally before you actually spend any money on it you do
need to make sure that the system you’re going to try to run it on is capable of running the
product. And there are various places on Microsoft.com where you can check the requirements,
both hardware and software requirements. And for instance, for operating system you need to
have Windows 7 or later. So that’s 7, 8 or 8.1, or 10. The list of the required operating systems is

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

there. And then you also need to check the hardware requirements as well. One of the things that
I’m going to talk about a couple of times during the course is the use of touch. And increasingly
people are using certainly some aspects of Microsoft Project using touch. So if you are planning
to use it on a touch device you might like to read those multi-touch requirements there. But in
any case check those requirements, make sure the device you’re planning to run Microsoft
Project on is up to the job certainly before you spend money.

And one other very important factor here which many people seem to overlook is the choice of
either the 32 bit or 64 bit version of Project. There is a compatibility issue in terms of Project and
all of the components of Office and mixing 32 bit and 64 bit versions is subject to some rules
that are summarized in this page. Obviously you need to look for the current version of this page.
And there’s a specific point on this page related to Project. If you’re working with files over 2
GB in Project then you would need to use the 64 bit version. Now in terms of functionality in
terms of this course either version is fine. I’m going to be running with the 32 bit version and
that’s compatible with all of the other components of Office that I have installed. But again
depending on what you already have installed on your device you may need to bear that in mind
as well.

Now in terms of installing Microsoft Project once you’ve acquired it that’s really between you
and Microsoft. I’m not going to give you installation instructions. But once you have acquired
the copy that you’re going to use and you’ve installed it you should get to the point where you
can fire it up, you can start it and you’ll get that start screen that I showed you at the end of the
previous section and that I’m going to show you again now.

So there we are. There’s Project 2016 or to be more precise Project Pro for Office 365. I’m ready
to start. I hope you are as well. Please join me in the next section.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Course Review

Toby: So we’re almost ready to start creating some projects but I’m afraid there’s still a couple
of things to cover before we really get started. And in this section I’m going to give you an
overview of the course and point out a couple of important things that you need to bear in mind
when we’re working through the course, a couple of things that you may need to do before we
start.

Now first of all if you are going to use a touch device on this course and I’m basically not going
to use a touch device. I’m going to use keyboard and mouse, although I will talk about touch
devices a little as we go along. One of the first things you need to do is to enable Touch Mode in
Project. Now you can work using a touch device without being in Touch Mode but unless you’ve
got quite thin fingers you’re going to find it quite difficult.

Given the Start screen what I’m going to do is sort of leap ahead a bit here and we’re going to
click on the Blank Project button there, create a blank Project first of all, and then in the top left
hand corner of the screen there is something called the Quick Access Toolbar. And on the Quick
Access Toolbar there is a button. If I hover over it it’s called Touch/Mouse Mode. That’s what it
says. Now if you don’t see that button there, if you move a little to the right there’s a dropdown
arrow that says Customize Quick Access Toolbar. Click on that, Touch/Mouse Mode will be in
the list, probably near the bottom like mine. And all you need to do if you can’t see it there will
be no tick mark there. All we need to do is tick it, click it once and you will see that
Touch/Mouse Mode button.

Now once you can see that button there’s a little, tiny little arrow at the right of that and if you
click on that it gives you a choice of Mouse Mode or Touch Mode. You need to go into Touch
Mode if you’re going to use a touch device.

Now as I point out later on I’m not greatly in favor of touch devices with Microsoft Project
because I think some things are actually pretty difficult with a touch device. But I know that an
increasing number of people are using touch. If you select Touch Mode what happens is the
Ribbon, the bar with all those commands on it to the left and right of where I am now, the
Ribbon, all of those buttons get spaced out much more and you’re going to find it much easier to
work along with me using a touch device if you’re in Touch Mode.

So if you need to be in Touch Mode do that straightaway and then you’re going to find
everything becomes quite a lot easier.

Now I’m going to go back into Mouse Mode and I’ve actually started a project here, Project 1
it’s called. Note the name there, Project 1. So I’m going to click on the File button there and then
I’m going to Close that project by clicking on the Close option. And then I’m back to being
ready to start work on another project which we’ll come back to just a little bit later on.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

So having showed you how to change into Touch Mode if you need to let me go back to talking
about the structure of the course.

Now I’ve arranged this in a sequence which should suit beginners very well. If you have used
Microsoft Project before there may be sections that you can skip over but I will try to make it
clear in each section towards the beginning of the section what we’re going to cover so that you
can decide if you have used Project before whether you need to cover that particular topic or not.

Now during the course I’m obviously going to demonstrate a number of tools and techniques and
primarily I’m going to use a particular project for this. I’m going to arrange a wedding and then
we’re going to go through the steps, the tasks leading up to the wedding and see the sort of thing
that happens, the sort of problems that arise, and we’ll be looking at aspects of the wedding like
costs and resources, the people and other resources that are needed in the wedding.

I’ll be setting you a number of exercises to do during the course and your exercises are going to
be based on your project which is to refit a bathroom. I’ll be telling you about both of those
projects in some of the early sections of the course.

Now so that you can work through all of the examples that I use on the course there is a course
files folder and the contents of the folder should be very similar to the list that you can see in
front of you here. And as you go through each section of the course you should be able to match
it up to one of those files. You can open it up on your installation of Microsoft Project 2016 and
work through it with me.

And for the exercises in the course there’s another folder with my sample answers to those
exercises as well. As well as some of the information that you’ll need in order to be able to try
the exercises yourself.

And for both of those sets of files make sure you know where they are. And I suggest that you
keep a sort of backup copy as well in case anything goes wrong and you need to be able to start
from scratch again with any of the files.

And then a couple of other things to point out. One of them is that I will primarily be using U.S.
locale for this course. And where costs are involved I will generally use the U.S. dollar as my
currency. When I talk about cost and currency I will demonstrate one or two of the other options.
If you’re working along with me or when you’re doing your exercise by all means use your own
locale and your own local currency. It won’t significantly change any aspect of what you’re
learning about Project 2016.

I’m running Project here on Windows 10. But again if there is any point in the course where the
fact that you’re running it on Windows 7 or Windows 8 or 8.1 makes a difference I will try to
point that out to you. But I don’t anticipate anything that would actually cause you a problem.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

I should also point out that I’m recording this widescreen. And because of the fact that it’s
widescreen and because of the resolution on the screen exactly what you see at any time, not just
on this start screen, but at any screen in Project 2016 yours may look quite different to mine.
Everything from what fits on the Ribbon to how wide or how narrow any particular columns,
how tall any rows are, any of these things can be affected by the size and resolution of the
screen. But the content in general will be the same. It’s more a question of how much of it you
can see at any one time.

And the final thing to point out, just in case you’re wondering, I don’t cover any programming.
There’s no VBA programming on this particular course. If you’ve looked at our earlier Project
2010 and Project 2013 advanced courses you’ll see that in those courses we covered some VBA
programming.

So that’s it. That’s all you need to know about the course. We’ve got one other very short section
next on what’s new in Project 2016, particularly aimed at those of you who have used earlier
versions. If you haven’t used an earlier version it may well be that what’s new in Project 2016
won’t mean much to you. But it’s a pretty short section so why don’t you watch it anyway. I’ll
see then.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: What’s New in Project 2016

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m going to take a quick look at what’s new in Project 2016. One of the reasons
that it’s a quick look is that there isn’t really very much new in Project 2016 at all in terms of
functionality that is specific to Project.

I’m looking currently at one of the pages on Office.com, What’s New in Project 2016. Now as I
pointed out before I normally say at this point you need to check the latest information. Well I
don’t expect they’re going to put anything else new in Project 2016 so when you come to watch
this video I don’t expect any other additions. But let’s go through the main points anyway.

One of the things that we are going to be looking at a little bit later on in the course is more
flexible timelines. If you haven’t used Project before you won’t necessarily have any idea of
what Project’s Timelines are. In the past there has effectively been one timeline. So in Project
2013 there was one timeline. You can now have a number of timelines and I’ll explain this to
you later on in the course.

One of the other big changes, better control over resource scheduling, really is quite a significant
addition. However, it isn’t a change that is specific to Project 2016. It actually only affects users
of Project 2016 if you’re using Project Online as well. And since we don’t cover Project Online
in this course I won’t be covering this point. Now if at some point in the future you do start to
use Project Online then it’ll be useful referring back to these notes about resource scheduling.
But this new feature is not relevant if you are only using Project 2016.

The third item on the list is do things quickly with Tell Me. This is actually a feature which is
provided across the board in Office 2016 and if you use other components of Office 2016 you
may already have come across this feature. But I am going to cover it during the course. And in
particular I’m going to look at it round about the time that we look at Help.

And the fourth topic is new Themes for Project. And I will cover the new Themes for Project
when we look at the Project workspace in a section or two from now.

So as you see that is the list. It’s not a very long list. So if you’ve used Project before and
particularly if you’ve used Project 2013 before there’s not really a lot extra to talk about. If
you’ve used a much earlier version then there were certainly a lot more additions in Project 2013
and Project 2010 than there are in Project 2016.

Now apart from that particular source for information there is another interesting blog that you
can read. Now this is an Office blog by members of the Project team. And as you can see there it
talks about resource engagements. And as I said before that’s one of the topics we won’t be

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

covering because it relies on Project Online. It talks about Timelines. Again, we will be covering
that. And Tell Me, we will be covering that.

Now there is one point in this blog that isn’t covered in that What’s New section. That’s the
reason I pointed you in the direction of this blog. Read/Write Office Add-Ins. And basically
these extensions and you can download them from the Office Store, enable third-party products
to interact with effectively the Project database. Now exactly which third-party products are
available and exactly what they can do I’m going to need you to check yourself in the Office
Store. But it’s a good sign that you’re starting to see third-party products that can interact with
Microsoft Project and that can give you additional functionality.

And that’s it. That’s really what’s new in Project 2016. Some of it is only partly in Project 2016.
And as with the last example there it’s actually third-party products. But the interaction between
these third-party products and Project 2016 has been fully enabled in Project 2016.

So that’s it. That’s what’s new in Project 2016. In the next section we’re actually going to get
started on a project. So please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Chapter 2 – Workspace, the Ribbon and Help

Video: The Project 2016 Workspace

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m going to take you on a tour of the Project workspace and we’re also going to
start creating a very simple project. And I’ll use that very simple project to demonstrate key
points concerning the Project workspace.

You’ve already seen this Start screen and you’ll probably see this quite a few times during the
course. Although as you’ll see a little bit later on you may want to disable the Start screen once
you really get used to using Project 2016. You may decide that you can get along perfectly well
without it.

Now let me give you a quick tour of the Start screen itself.

Over on the left we have an area which gives us links to existing projects. We have a Recent
section. Currently this section is empty. As you can see the note there says you haven’t opened
any projects recently. Once we start working on projects you’ll start to see a list of recent
projects appear there. And then below that there is a link, Open other Projects, which gives us
access to a Windows Browse Dialogue so you can browse your computer, you can browse any
network locations you have access to and you can browse Cloud areas, such as your OneDrive
storage. Now we’re going to start with a new project so we won’t be using that part of the Start
screen on this occasion.

In the top right we have some standard Windows buttons. The little question mark is Help. Note
the Screen Tip there. Help and F1 is the keyboard shortcut for that. Then we have Minimize and
we have Maximize or Restore, depending on whether your screen is currently maximized or not.
And then we also have a Close button. Below that we have my name and the account under
which I am currently running Project 2016. This is very important. If you’re the only person that
uses this PC and you’re the only person that uses Project on this PC and you only have one
account that you ever run Project under then this will always indicate that account. But if, for
example, you sometimes use a work account and sometimes a personal account, if you share this
PC with somebody else you may want to switch between accounts. Well the facility here, Switch
Account, let’s you switch between those accounts. And I’ll demonstrate that to you a little bit
later on.

Now let me talk about the rest of the Start screen. And I’m going to say this once more. I won’t
keep saying it. You may not see exactly the same as me. It will depend on a number of things.
But almost certainly the first thing you will see here is a Blank Project thumbnail. I’m going to
click on that in a little while and we’re going to create a blank project. So that’s an empty
starting point for a project. But I’m going to run through some of these others first.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

If you run projects that have an element of similarity, maybe you do building projects, marketing
projects, then you may already have a project that you’d like to base a new one on. And the
second thumbnail here, New from Existing Project, enables you to use an existing project as a
starting point for a new one. The third thumbnail, New from Excel Workbook, let’s you create a
project from an Excel workbook. And what this basically means is that you have perhaps a list of
tasks on a worksheet in an Excel workbook and you want to make that list of tasks the starting
point for a project. The fourth thumbnail, New from SharePoint Tasks List, is a pretty similar
kind of thing but in relation to SharePoint. So if you have a list of tasks in Microsoft SharePoint
and you want to use those as the basis for a project you can use that option.

Now the other thumbnails all correspond to different standard project templates. So if I were
working on a software development project I could use the first template there, Software
Development Plan, and it would get me started on a typical set of tasks as a starting point for a
software development project.

Now you’ll see a whole list of these templates. These templates you may think of in the old
terminology as boiler plates but nowadays we generally call them templates. And there are many
there. So Residential Construction is there, for example. New Business Plan is another one. But
there are available online many, many templates that you can base new projects on.

And there is a Search facility at the top here. So if you wanted a project plan for a particular
thing you could do a search here. In fact there are some standard searches, suggested searches as
they called underneath. So Project Management, Project Plan, Project Themes, etcetera. Let’s
suppose and this is definitely potentially going to be very useful, I wanted to look for a project
plan for a wedding. Let me do a Search on wedding. This is of course an online facility so I need
to be connected to the internet. Let’s try Wedding. And it comes up with a Wedding Planner. If I
were to click on that wedding planner then it would let me see a little bit more detail about what
this wedding planner is. So it shows me the first few tasks. It gives me a description. Wedding
Planner provided by Microsoft Corporation. It tells me how big it is. It gives me a bit of a
description about the wedding planner. And then I could use that to create a wedding plan. And
in fact that’s not very far removed from what I’m going to do a little bit later on. But let me just
close that for the moment and go back to this screen because apart from giving me potential
Project Templates for a wedding there are search results from other Office applications. So it
shows me potentially other useful artifacts related to other Office applications. Let’s look at
PowerPoint for instance. There are seven found items related to PowerPoint. Now each of these
is a template for a PowerPoint presentation. So there’s a wedding photo album, a wedding
reception seating chart and a stylish photo cards template. Now there are other suitable wedding
related artifacts that can be used in Word, Publisher, and Excel. So we’re not really going to
cover that on this course but they can be very useful links to other artifacts that you can use with
the other components of Office.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Having taken a look at that let’s go back to the Start screen. We just use the Back button there,
the Browse Back button. It takes us back to the Start screen. And we’re going to create a blank
project. Now as soon as I do this I want you to look in the bottom left hand corner of the screen
because a little message will pop up for a few seconds that you’ll get used to seeing and after a
while you’ll probably just ignore, but I need to explain it to you briefly now and then in a little
bit more detail later on. So click on Blank Project, look down in the corner, New tasks are
created in manually scheduled mode. As you’ll see later on there are two modes of scheduling.
There’s manually scheduled and there’s auto-scheduled. Most of the time I tend to work in auto-
scheduled mode. And after you’ve been using Project for a while you will choose which mode
you prefer. The fact that I currently have this in manually scheduled mode and you may or may
not have it in manually scheduled mode really doesn’t matter at the moment. Don’t worry about
that. We’ll come back to that a little bit later on. What we need to concentrate on here is the
workspace overall.

So first of all in the top left hand corner you have the Quick Access Toolbar that I mentioned
earlier on in the course. You may not see quite the same buttons as me there but we’ll come back
to that in a couple of sections time. And in the top right hand corner you have some standard
Windows buttons. Let me just hover over those. So you have Minimize, Restore/Down and
Close.

The main Ribbon is this. So it’s a big block right across the screen, very near the top. I’m going
to explain the Ribbon to you in quite a bit of detail again in a couple of sections from now.

Above the Ribbon in the middle is the name of the current project. We’ve just created a project.
By default it’s called Project 1. If we created another one by default it would be called Project 2
and so on.

Now below the Ribbon we have something called the Entry Bar. And the Entry Bar is something
that we can use to enter and edit data into our project. You may or may not have that entry bar
shown. If you don’t see that don’t worry. I’m going to show you in a while how to show that if it
isn’t shown already. Basically the kind of thing we use the entry bar for is this. If I want to enter
the name of the first task in my project I click in the Task Name Field there, first task name in
the first row of my project. And then if I click in the Entry Bar I could call it Task 1. Having
typed that I click on the tick mark to the left of task 1 and that is the name of my first task. If I
click down to the next row and I intended to type Task 2, I could type Task 2, change my mind,
click on the X to the left, the cross there, and that cancels what I’m typing. That’s the Entry Bar.
More later.

Below the Entry Bar we have the Timeline. I mentioned the Timeline much earlier on when I
was talking about what’s new and the fact that you can have several timelines now in Project
2016. You may or may not see the Timeline. If you don’t see it you can show it by, if you go up
to the Ribbon, above the Ribbon there’s the word View. Click on View. Even if you don’t

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

understand the Ribbon just click on View. And roughly in the middle, just to the right of the
middle of the commands immediately under there there’s one that says Timeline. And as you can
see it’s checked. Mine is ticked. That means the Timeline is shown. If I uncheck it the Timeline
disappears. Check it again, the Timeline is now shown. So that’s the Timeline. When I’ve got
some tasks it will show those tasks on the Timeline. Now in fact I’ve just entered one task there.
It hasn’t got any work in it. And the timeline can be set to run over a period of time. Now by
default my new project is starting today, so that’s December the 14th. And because I haven’t got
any tasks or work that involve anything in them the end date, the finish date, at the right hand
end of the timeline is also December the 14th. So it’s not the most exciting project in the world at
the moment. I’m not really doing much and therefore it’s one of those situations where I can
safely say that my project is on time.

Below the Timeline is the main project window. And by default on my installation I show a
Gantt Chart. And a Gantt Chart actually comprises two parts. It comprises the list of tasks. It’s
actually a table and we refer to this as the table. And on the right we have the chart itself which is
normally a pictorial representation of the tasks in my project. Now you may or may not have a
Gantt Chart shown. If you don’t have a Gantt Chart shown you will soon find out how to show a
Gantt Chart there. And there will be situations when you’ll want to see one of the many other
types of chart that you can show in the main body of the display there, the main window.

Now just to give you a little bit more of an idea of how that’s going to look let’s go back to that
first task, Task 1. I’m going to click in the duration column there in line with Task 1. And I’m
going to say that this is a two day task. Click elsewhere and there is my Gantt Bar for a two day
task. Now there are various things about that bar in terms of its color, its ends and so on that each
have significance and we’re going to talk about those later on. But basically as we start to build
up a schedule we’ll build up entries in the table on the left and each of those will be represented
by a Gantt Bar or other appropriate symbol in the chart on the right.

The next aspect of the workspace to look at is the Status Bar across the bottom of the project
window. At the left hand end there are optional pieces of information. One of the ones that’s
shown there now is New tasks are manually scheduled, which I mentioned earlier on in this
section. And at the right hand end there are controls for the view. So we can do things like
choose the view of the project we currently have and we can also use the Zoom controls, more
on those later.

And the last part of the workspace that I want to look at is what’s called the Backstage or
Backstage View. Now what we’re looking at here is effectively a project. It’s a very simple
project with one ask in it at the moment but this is where we work on the contents of our project.
Administration of projects, doing everything from saving them to printing them to sharing them,
this is all done in what’s called Backstage View or just Backstage. And to get to Backstage View
you click on File which is above the left hand end of the Ribbon. So if I click on File it takes me
into Backstage View. Backstage View has a load of options, Info, New, Open, Save, etcetera,

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

and we’ll be covering those as we go through the course. It’s also, for example, in Backstage
View where we set up project information. When I’ve used Backstage View I get back to my
project again using that Back button and that take me back into my project again.

So there we are. That’s all the basics of the workspace for now. In the next section I want to take
a quick look at Help. So please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Online Help

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m going to look at Help. And for those of you who have used Project before
Help in 2016 is a little bit different in terms of how it works. And in line with virtually all other
modern major software products you’re very much restricted on Help if you are not online. So
I’m going to demonstrate Help offline in a little while but let’s start with online. And let’s start
with how you access Help.

Now as I pointed out earlier on in the course if you see this little question mark icon up here it’s
a Help link. And you can either click on Help or use the F1 keyboard shortcut. In fact in Project
2016 it’s probably a better idea to get used to using the F1 keyboard shortcut because quite often
you don’t see the question mark icon. But let me click on the icon now anyway and that takes me
to the Help Homepage.

The Help Homepage has a list of what it calls the top categories. Each item in the list is
expandable. So Get Started, for instance, if I click on that, gives me a number of options. So I’ve
got what’s new in Project 2016, basic tasks, etcetera. Choose one of those, what’s new in Project
2016 for example and that takes me either to another menu or in this case it takes me through to a
Help page.

Having arrived at this page there may well be links to other Help pages. And the Help is
basically browser based. So I have options such as a Back button and then I also have a Home
button which will take me home. So that’s back to the Homepage with the top categories listed
again. And whichever topic I’m on I have the option to print that topic using that Print Button.
And if you have a need for the text to be larger on a particular page this button enables you to
change to a larger size of text in the Help or to reduce the size of the text. And very importantly
within the Help system there is a Search facility. So if you want help on a particular topic, let’s
suppose you want help on the topic Entry Bar. You want to know how to, for example, enable or
disable the entry bar. Type in Entry Bar and there you see a list of topics related to the search
term. The first topic has Entry Bar in it. Later topics will have either the word Entry or the word
Bar together or separately. And like most of the search functions that we use nowadays it
prioritizes them according to the closeness of match to the search term.

Incidentally in this particular case you might like to just note that activate the entry bar to edit
text in a field, F2. If you can’t see the Entry Bar in your installation of Project 2016 that’s how
you bring it up. You use the F2 key.

Now let’s go back home again. I’m not going to go through these Help topics now but I suggest
that with Get Started you make a point of going through some of those basic topics. Obviously
I’m going to cover these topics during the course. And in most cases I’ll be covering things in
much more detail than the Help does but it’s always a good idea to get a different view on these

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

topics and of course to get the official Microsoft view. So do try to find some time to go through
these Help topics. Perhaps going through them as we cover them on the course.

Now when you’ve finished using Help all you need to do is to close the browser using the Close
button in the top right hand corner there.

Now there are some situations where you can access Help in different ways. And in some of
these situations in the past I’ve referred to this as contextual help. And the principle there is that
you ask for help in a particular situation and it goes straight to the relevant page of help. Now
largely speaking in Project 2016 this doesn’t work in quite as contextual a way as it used to. Let
me show you what I mean. I’m going to create a blank project. And if I go for a particular topic,
let me go to the Report Tab on the Ribbon. And I’m going to click on Getting Started and the
button there will bring up a dialogue. This is the Reports Dialogue that I can use to select a report
on the progress of my project, for example. And that has indeed got a little question mark button.
Now generally speaking if I click on one of these within a dialogue I would expect to be taken to
the help about that particular dialogue. Largely speaking in Project 2016 Help links take you to
that homepage. So largely speaking they are not contextual anymore. Now of course you can
search for the particular report that you were thinking you might want to create and you can use
Help in that way. But it doesn’t take you right there.

Now a couple of other things to tell you about. One of them is what happens if you are not
connected to the internet. Let me just show you that. I’m going to close Help and I’m going to
disconnect from the internet. So I now no longer have an internet connection. I’m going to press
the F1 key and rather disappointingly that’s all I get. Help is only available online. You aren’t
connected to the internet. In previous versions of Project there was usually something there. I
think in the case of Project 2013 it helped you to find items on the Ribbon. That wasn’t really
much but it might help you in some situations. At the time of recording this if you’re offline you
don’t get any help at all.

So the last thing I want to show you about Help is the new feature, Tell me what you want to do.
This as I understand it will improve and become more comprehensive over time. We’re very
much dealing with an early version of this feature. But let me just give you a quick
demonstration of it.

Let’s suppose there’s something you want to do and you don’t remember where the command is
that does it or perhaps you’re not quite sure how to do it. Let’s suppose that you want to set a
baseline. Now setting a baseline may mean nothing at all to you at the moment. Let me just click
in that box and type in Set baseline. Now as I do that it recognizes all or part of what I’m typing
so it gives me their options, Set baseline, Show baseline, Set reminder, etcetera. As I do that I
may say, “Ah Set baseline. That’s what I want to do.” And then there’s a little pop out menu
there, Set baseline, Clear baseline. Now if that’s exactly what I want to do if I click on that
option it brings up the relevant dialogue to do that. And if I know how to use that dialogue I can

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

actually go ahead and do it. Of course there is a Help link there as well. Note that some of these
Help links have a button with the word Help in rather than the question mark. And in this case
though if I click on it it is contextual. So some of there, some of them aren’t. Most of them
aren’t. Close and we go back to where I was before.

But the other point to mention here, let me just do that again. Apart from going to that dialogue if
I’m still not sure, if I want to check something there is a link there to get help on Set baseline. So
I wanted to get help on setting a baseline what it does is effectively a search on set baseline in
Help and then it offers me a number of possible links.

So that’s that new Tell me what you want to do or the Tell Me feature. As it evolves I think it
could become a useful feature. I think we’re still at the fairly early stages of it with Project 2016.
But please give it a try.

That’s it on Help. I’ll see you in the next section.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Ribbon and Toolbars

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section we’re going to look at the Ribbon and Toolbars. If you’ve used other Microsoft
software that uses the Ribbon and Toolbars it’s probably the case that you can skip this section if
you want to. I will talk about one or two things that are quite specific to Microsoft Project but I
think that if you’re an experienced user of the Ribbon you’ll be able to pick these up easily
enough as we go along anyway.

Now for those of you who aren’t so familiar with the Ribbon let me just explain. The Ribbon
system was introduced well about eight or nine years ago now by step by step through the
various components of Microsoft Office. And it’s now fairly fully and fairly consistently
implemented in these components, including Project. As I pointed out already, it’s this rectangle
with a number of tabs. And you select a tab. So for instance at the moment I have the Report Tab
selected. You select a tab by clicking on the name. So this is the Task Tab, this is the Resource
Tab, and so on. In most of Project there’s a whole bunch of tabs, Task, Resource, Report,
Project, that you will see whenever you’re using Project. Now this can be changed by local
settings but talking in general terms here.

But there are some tabs that only appear in certain situations and these are what’s called
contextual tabs. And we have a contextual tab here. It’s this Format Tab. And the Format Tab in
this case is part of what’s called the Gantt Chart Tools. And this is contextual in that because we
have a Gantt Chart shown here, note the lying its side label here, Gantt Chart. We see the Gantt
Chart Tools Format Tab which enables us to format a Gantt Chart to change the styling, etcetera.
If I changed the view, so instead of showing the Gantt Chart I’m going to show, for example, a
Network Diagram. I now have Network Diagram View and I get a contextual tab for that. The
Format Tab which is part of the Network Diagram Tools. We’ll see some other contextual tabs
as go through the course but let me for the moment go back into Gantt Chart View.

One each of the tabs there are a number of controls. And the controls can be all sorts of things.
They can be command buttons, they can be dropdown lists, they can be sets of radio buttons,
etcetera. And they’re arranged into groups. So for instance on the View Tab here the group on
the left is the Task Views Group and there are five controls here: Gantt Chart, Task Usage and
these other three. Each of these controls can be a single control or for instance as in here it can
give access to a whole menu of other options.

Now I should point out here something that I did point out earlier on and that is that depending
on the size of your screen, depending on the resolution of your screen, depending on whether
you’re in mouse mode or touch mode exactly what you see on each tab may well vary. You may
see more or less controls in each of the groups than I do on this screen. I’m recording this course
on a PC with quite a high resolution. If you have a smaller resolution PC, perhaps running it on a

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

laptop with much less space on the screen, you may well see less than me. But you should pretty
much see the same groups even if exactly what you can see in each group is a little bit different
from what I see.

So let’s now try to execute a command or two. I’m going to go to the Task Tab. And one thing
you will notice is that some of the commands are grayed out. So for instance, in the Clipboard
Group on the Task Tab you have a Cuts command, a Copy command and something called a
Format Painter that are not grayed out. So you could do those things at the moment. Whereas
you can’t use the Paste command. It’s grayed out because we don’t have anything copied to the
Clipboard. And as with Windows applications in general, of course graying out indicates that a
particular command is not available.

Let me type a name of a task into this Task Name box for the first task in this little project. I
could use the tick next to the Entry Bar or just press the Enter key. And I now have Task 1. If I
select that particular task name by clicking on the box you can see that the box has a border
around it so it’s selected. If I wanted to make that bold I could use the Bold command in the Font
Group on the Task Tab. Text of that is now bold. I could make it Italic and I could change the
font from Calibri to say Blackoak Standard and I could make it a larger font size, for example.
So that’s basically how you can use the commands on the Ribbon.

Now we’re not restricted to styling text. If you take that particular task you could do all sorts of
things to it. For instance, you could record progress on that task using the commands on the
Ribbon. But more of that later.

Now slightly at the danger of getting ahead of ourselves here one thing you’ll notice, particularly
as your projects get bigger, is that the Ribbon does take up a lot of space. And particularly if
you’re using a small screen it takes up a disproportionately large amount of space. You can hide
the Ribbon. And there’s a little up arrow over here at the right hand end. It says Collapse the
Ribbon. And if you click on Collapse the Ribbon the Ribbon is hidden. Now you may say well
that certainly gives me a bit more space but how do I use the commands? The answer to that is
that provided you’ve got a reasonable idea of where a command is. So for instance, if I wanted to
change the size of that Task 1 font back to 10 or 11 point, if I know the commands on the Task
Tab all I have to do is go back to the Task Tab, click on the name and the Ribbon reappears. So
if I then say okay it’s 18 and I want to put it back to 11. And then if I want to execute another
command, so for instance I want to change the font. Once I finish, click back in my project
again, then the Ribbon is hidden again. Now when I describe that to you I said if I know where
the particular command is on the Task Tab in that case, if you don’t know where it is you can
still click on any one of the tabs and you can click around until you find the particular command
that you want. If you get to a point though at which you think well actually I need the Ribbon
available all the time again. I don’t want it collapsed anymore. If I just right click in there again,
notice Collapse the Ribbon is ticked. Just click to untick it and the Ribbon will be there all of the
time now and you can see all of the contents of the Ribbon all of the time.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

One other thing I’d like to point out here is that you can customize the Ribbon. And in particular
you can create your own Ribbon tabs. And you might be wondering about these two tabs here,
Reporting and Team. You may be looking at your installation of Project and thinking why
haven’t I got those? Well these are two custom tabs that I have made for specific purposes. I’m
not going to cover customization of the Ribbon here but I am going to briefly look at
customizing the Quick Access Toolbar a little bit later on in this section and that should give you
a pretty clear idea of how to set about customizing the Ribbon.

Let’s now turn our attention to the Quick Access Toolbar that we looked at earlier on in the
course. And as you can see mine has about five or six commands currently shown. One of them
we talked about was the Touch/Mouse Mode command. And then we have Undo and Redo and
Save. You may be a little bit mystified by these two symbols here. These are two commands that
I’ve put on the Quick Access Toolbar. They’re actually custom commands. I’ll come back to
those in just a moment. But as I explained earlier on if you want to change what’s shown on the
Quick Access Toolbar there is a standard pool of commands. So if I wanted the Quick Print
command shown I’d select it from the menu here, click it, and Quick Print is now shown.

Now apart from switching on and off those standard commands you can customize the Quick
Access Toolbar. And if I click on More Commands here it takes me into a page of the Project
Options. Now Project Options we’re going to look at in two or three sections from now but what
we have open here is the Quick Access Toolbar page which we can use to customize the Quick
Access Toolbar. And let’s suppose that I want to add a button to the toolbar which will enable
me with one click to make something bold. What I need to do is to find the Bold command in the
list on the left and then add it to the toolbar. Now the list on the left is controlled by this
dropdown. And first of all we have the Popular Commands and they’re in alphabetical order. I
can’t see Bold there. So if instead of Popular Commands I say All Commands I have access to
the literally hundreds of commands that are available in Microsoft Project. And I want to find
Bold. There it is. So I select Bold. I click on the Add button between the two lists and it’s now
added to my Quick Access Toolbar. If I want to put it in a different position I can select it and
use the up and down arrows here to change its position in the list. And those two custom
commands I’m going to remove both of those. I don’t need those at the moment so I’m going to
remove them. And that’s it. Click on OK and my Quick Access Toolbar will be customized. If at
some stage you make a mistake and you want to go back to the default, the settings as they were
originally, there’s a Reset button there. So click on OK and there is my Bold command on the
Quick Access Toolbar. And with the cell, with the task name Task 1 selected I can switch Bold
on and off using that command.

It may well be that after you have been using Project 2016 for a while you will find it very useful
to customize the Quick Access Toolbar. Also some people customize it to do particular jobs. So
for example, if a project manager is doing a weekly update of status he may put various
commands associated with task status on the Quick Access Toolbar or indeed create a custom tab
for the Ribbon for that purpose.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

One other thing about the Quick Access Toolbar that some people fine useful. It’s right up in the
top left hand corner there and you have to sort of go across the Ribbon to get to it. You can
actually position it below the Ribbon. It’s very simple. Just click on the dropdown there. Show
below the Ribbon and it appears down here. It’s quite a bit easier to get to when you’re doing
perhaps a long or repetitive task within the body of a project. And then of course you do pretty
much the opposite to put it back again.

Now there’s one other type of toolbar that I want to point out to you now. And it’s one that pops
up all over the place. We’re going to be using this type of toolbar in many places in the course. If
you take Task 1 here, select it here. If I right click within that cell I get what’s called a
Contextual Menu. And it’s contextual in that the commands that are available there although
they’re all also available from various places on the Ribbon, these are deemed to be the ones that
you are most likely to want to use in the situation that you’re in. And above that contextual menu
there is a mini toolbar. And again this deemed to be contextual, to contain the commands that are
appropriate to where you are in Project and what you’re doing. So these work pretty much on the
principle I’m sure you’d expect them to. You click on things and they either execute commands
or bring up other menus or bring up dialogues or whatever. So we have these contextual menus
like this one and then we have mini toolbars like this one. And as I say, we’ll be using these at
various points during the course.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Status Bar

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’d like to take a quick look at the Status Bar. Now I’m going to deal with it in two
parts, the left part and the right part. But importantly if you right click anywhere on the Status
Bar you will see a list of potential contents. And whatever’s ticked is currently shown. Note the
header there, Customize Status Bar.

Now you might be surprised to see quite so many ticks but actually not very much information
on the Status Bar at all. And the reason for this is that apart from the bottom two entries, View
Shortcuts and Zoom Slider which are the things that are shown at the right hand end of the Status
Bar, the things on the left correspond to optional pieces of information you can show but which
very often don’t show anything at all. So for example, if you look at the item fourth down the list
there, Filter, it’s ticked. And what that means is that if a filter is being applied to the current view
show the name of the filter there. Now in this case no filter is being applied and therefore you
don’t see anything. So with quite a few of these items even though they’re ticked most of the
time you won’t see anything unless you’re using that particular feature.

Now there are a couple of things shown at the left hand end. One of them is Ready which is the
Cell Mode. If I click Cell Mode so that that’s not shown you’ll see the effect. It no longer says
Ready because I’m not showing the Cell Mode. The other thing that’s shown is whether new
tasks are manually scheduled or auto-scheduled. If I tick that it will no longer show that currently
they’re manually scheduled by default.

Now the other items although they’re ticked there’s nothing to see. One of them that isn’t ticked
is this one which is the Macro Recording indicator. We’re currently not recording a macro.
That’s a sequence of steps that we can replay automatically. If I check that you’ll see the little
icon that indicates that we’re not recording. If I started recording a macro and left this checked
then you would see a different icon whilst we were recording. And in fact that icon would give
you a way of stopping the recording. We’re not going to be covering macro recording anytime
soon so let’s check that off. And let’s concentrate on the right hand end of the Status Bar.

Now the bottom two options there, View Shortcuts. The first one corresponds to this set of
buttons that I can use to enable different views of my project. So let me just click away there. I
currently have Gantt Chart View. But if I go to this one, this is Task Usage View. And if I go to
this one it’s Team Planner View and so on. I’ll be covering all of these later on in the course.
And the fact that that second to bottom option is ticked means that those buttons are there to
enable me to easily switch between those views. As an alternative to those I can select the view I
want from the View Tab on the Ribbon. And in fact there are many more options on the View
Tab on the Ribbon.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

The very bottom option, Zoom Slider, gives me access to this control that I can use to zoom in
and out of the current view. And this basically zooms by time. So as I zoom out I get a broader
view of time. So now you can see in that view that I’m looking at quarters. If I zoom in by
clicking on the plus button there I’m down to months, then weeks, then eventually I get down to
individual days. Now again I can either use that. It’s quite a course control but I can use that. Or
on the View Tab on the Ribbon there is a Zoom Group that lets me be much more accurate and
much more flexible about how much I’m zoomed in on the current view.

So that’s it. That’s the Status Bar. Please join me in the next section.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Keyboard Shortcuts and Key Tips

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section we’re going to look at keyboard shortcuts and Key Tips. If you don’t use keyboard
shortcuts and you are not interested in finding out how to use them then you certainly can skip
this section. I do know that many people like to use keyboard shortcuts. They can be particularly
useful if you have repetitive jobs to do and you don’t like moving the mouse around all day.
You’d much rather just go straight to what you need to do using the keyboard. And for some
people the use of the keyboard is a necessity either because of an injury or some kind of
impairment and the use of the keyboard is much preferable to trying to use a mouse or some
other approach.

In Project 2016 keyboard shortcuts are very well supported. And in this section I’m going to take
you through the main options for using them.

Now of course the main problem with keyboard shortcuts for most people is knowing what they
are. And I must confess that I don’t really use keyboard shortcuts a lot. And the main reason is
because I have great trouble remembering them. I use a lot of different pieces of software in a
typical working day and I would just get confused if I tried to remember the hundreds of
keyboard shortcuts that might ultimately make my life a little bit quicker and simpler but which
would be very difficult to remember.

Having said that the common keyboard shortcuts, certainly as far as Microsoft Office are
concerned I use quite a bit. So things like Cut, Copy and Paste I use quite a bit.

If I go to a tab on the Ribbon. Let’s go to the Task Tab. If you wanted to know the keyboard
shortcut for Cut and you couldn’t remember it. If you hover over the Cut button it tells you that’s
Cut and it gives you the keyboard shortcut in brackets afterwards, Control plus X. Similarly for
copy Control-C. Format Painter, now unfortunately there isn’t one. And the problem is that for
many commands there is not an equivalent keyboard shortcut. So if you know a keyboard
shortcut already that’s fine and it’s supported in Project that’s fine. If not, if you hover over the
ribbon and the particular command you’re interested in you’ll soon find out whether there’s a
keyboard shortcut for it or not.

So the next option is is there a list of keyboard shortcuts? Well there is. If I press the keyboard
shortcut F1 to bring up online Help and go to that Getting Started section that we looked at
before, one of the options there is Keyboard Shortcuts for Project 2016. And that gives us a nice
list of all of the keyboard shortcuts. Now of course you can print this out. I know some people
print this out and stick it on the wall. The keyboard shortcuts are basically arranged in two sort of
categories here. There’s the Microsoft Office basics which takes you through to all of the
standard keyboard shortcuts that you’ll use with Microsoft Office. So this includes things like
moving around in text or cells. So one character to the left is left arrow, one line up is up arrow,

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

moving to the end of the line is End. So all of the standard shortcuts. But then you also have the
ones that relate specifically to Microsoft Project. So you’ve got keyboard shortcuts for using a
Network Diagram, navigating views and windows and so on. So there’s a list there. And if
you’re pretty good at remembering those things or as I say if you want to stick that on the wall
that’s a very good source for finding keyboard shortcuts.

So that’s a couple of ways of finding out what keyboard shortcuts are. There is another way and
that’s the use of Key Tips. And I’m going to demonstrate that to you now.

I’ve got the task name Task 1 selected in that single task in my current schedule. And I want to
underline the name and I can’t remember the keyboard shortcut to do underlining. So let me
demonstrate Key Tips.

First of all just tap the Alt key on the keyboard and it brings up some one and two character
codes for accessing the commands on the Quick Access Toolbar and the tabs on the Ribbon.
Now if I can’t remember which Ribbon tab it is I could step through these one at a time. But I do
know that what I want is on the Task Tab so I press the H key. That’s the access key for the Task
Tab. So I press H. And now the commands on the Task Tab on the Ribbon are each presented to
me with their various other letter or number codes. Now number three would give me access to
the Underline command. But let me just be a little bit more flexible than that. I want to bring up
the dialogue which gives me all of those formatting, font formatting commands. So I’m going to
do F and N. F then N. That brings up the Font dialogue. Now to go through the commands on the
Font dialogue I successively press the Tab key until I get to the one that says Underline. When
Underline is selected I press the Space Bar to enable Underline and then to okay that, if you look
at the top right hand corner of the dialogue you’ll see that the OK button is selected. So if I press
the Enter key that will be underlined. And as you can see Task 1 is now underlined.

Now you can bring up those Key Tips at any time by pressing the Alt key and you can switch
them off again by pressing the Alt key again.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Chapter 3 – Using Touch

Video: Overview of Principles

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m going to look at using Project 2016 using a touch screen device in a little bit
more detail. If you don’t use a touch device and have no desire or need to use a touch device you
can pretty much ignore this section, skip straight on to the next one.

Now Touch Mode in Project 2016 is an interesting thing in a way because it is supported and you
can do a lot of things using a touch device in Project 2016. But my feeling is that some things
don’t really lend themselves very well to the use of touch. But that is to some extent a personal
opinion and if you’re using a touch device with Project 2016 you may find that you can do pretty
much everything you need to do using touch.

Now the first thing I need to say is that with Microsoft products and particularly Microsoft
Office related products nowadays there do tend to be two or more versions of various products.
And when I’m looking at the use of touch here and in particular in relation to Project I’m talking
about touch as it’s used on a desktop product. And Microsoft themselves still say that their
desktop products are intended for use and are optimized for use with mouse and keyboard. So
they’re recommended way of using Project 2016 is still mouse and keyboard.

Having said that, as I say, if you want to use a touch device or need to use a touch device that’s
really what I’m going to do in this section. I’m going to give you a pretty quick overview of the
key points you need to be aware of.

Now before I demonstrate a bit of use of touch let me refer you to a document. Now as usual this
may change between the time that I record this and the time that you work your way through it.
But if you go to the Office.com site there is a particular page there that explains how to turn
Touch Mode on or off. Now I’ve already shown you how to do that. I’m not going to go through
it again.

But towards the bottom of that page there is a section, More Touch Tips, that gives a link to the
Office Touch Guide. And if you go to the Office Touch Guide it actually refers to Windows 8
here and of course I’m running here on Windows 10. And this Office Touch Guide really relates
to Office 2013, not 2016. But pretty much what is here is still totally relevant to what we’re
doing in Project 2016.

So it explains tap and pinch and stretch and slide. Now you may be very familiar with all of these
things and you may be familiar with them in relation to Office products. But if you’ve got any
doubts or uncertainties I suggest you have a look through those because it will tell you a lot
about general aspects of using touch with a Microsoft Office desktop product. Now there are

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

specifics there in relation to Excel and PowerPoint but just stop if you like at the end of the
general points, working with shapes and objects, and I think you may find this document a pretty
useful introduction to the use of touch that you can extend into your use of it with Project 2016.

So let me do a little bit of work on a project using touch. I’ve started that project. I’m just going
to use my fingertips from now on. I already have the Touch/Mouse Mode button visible on the
Quick Access Toolbar. So I’m going to tap on the dropdown and I’m going to choose Touch
Mode. Now as you saw earlier when I go into Touch Mode everything is spaced out more. It
certainly makes it easier to use with my fingers. And also as I mentioned earlier depending on
which tab on the Ribbon you’re using you may find that you get a few less commands shown.
And this will of course depend on the size and resolution of your screen, etcetera.

Now when it comes to adding details of a task, in theory all I have to do, for instance, is to tap
here in the Task Name field and depending on how my system is setup I may automatically get
an onscreen keyboard or I may need to invoke a keyboard myself. Now in this case I’m going to
invoke the keyboard by tapping on the keyboard down here on my Task Bar towards the bottom
right, up comes my keyboard. Now I’m going to start to type. When I’ve finished if I press the
Enter key it’ll take me down to the next task. So far so good. Let me put in a second task. Now
whatever point I finish using the keyboard of course I can close it again.

Let me go back to one of those tasks, tap it to select it. Note how in the case of using touch the
selection marker has those two little circles on the corners. This enables me to extend the
selection. For instance in this case I’m going to select the bottom right hand handle there and
drag it down so that I’ve got both of those tasks or their task names anyway, selected. So I’ve
now extended that selection to those two tasks.

Now let’s suppose that I want to do one of the things that I did earlier on. I want to make those
two bold. All I need to do is to tap on the Bold command in the Font Group on the Task Tab on
the Ribbon. Now those names are bold.

If I want to do something a little bit more sophisticated shall we say, what I showed you earlier
on when we were using mouse and keyboard was how to a right click to get a contextual menu.
Well in the case of touch that’s a case of tap and hold. So you tap and then when you get the
rectangle around the point where you’ve tapped you release in order to see the contextual menu.
Now in this case you may say well what contextual menu? All I can see is a mini toolbar. In fact
it’s almost a maxi toolbar really. It’s a lot bigger than the mini toolbars that we saw before. Now
in fact it is a mini toolbar. It’s one that’s optimized for touch. And the contextual menu actually
hangs off the right hand end of that mini toolbar. So if I tap on the little arrow at the right hand
end there is my contextual menu.

So there I’ve covered the basics of using touch. Clearly a lot of the other aspects of using touch
will come as you learn more and more about Project 2016. And I will point out key aspects of
using touch where they’re appropriate or significantly different from the way that you would do

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

things using mouse and keyboard. But the points that I’ve demonstrated here already are going to
be some of the key points that you need to be aware of if you’re using a touch device.

Let me just demonstrate one other thing. Again as a sort of general example. Let me just tap
somewhere else to remove the contextual menu and the mini toolbar that we had there. You saw
a couple of sections ago how to use these Zoom Slider. Well if you’re using touch you can also
do things like zooming the time scale with your fingers using pinch and stretch. So let me do a
bit of pinch and stretch on the right there. So I’m not using the zoom slider. But interestingly
note that as I do that with my fingers the zoom slider moves in response as well. So these tools
all integrate with each other. And in many I think a good way to think of using touch with
Project 2016 is that it’s an additional way of doing things rather than necessarily an alternative
way. And if you’re using a touch device and you become comfortable with it it can be quite
convenient in some situations.

On the other hand if I wanted to enter a duration for Task 1 I have quite a bit of trouble with my
fingers actually using those tiny little roller controls on the right there. You may have smaller
fingers than me or a bigger screen. With a bit of practice I can just about do it. But I do prefer to
just click on those rollers with the mouse.

That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Chapter 4 – Project Options

Video: Overview of Project Options

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section we’re going to take a look at Project Options. And to a large extent Project
Options represent your own personalization of your installation of Project and in the way that
you use Project on your projects. Some of these options you need to have set correctly before
you start to create and work on any kind of substantial project. And in fact as we’re going to get
started on our exercise project in the next section very important that you go through this one
carefully. Even if you’ve used Microsoft Project before I suggest that you follow this section
through because I’m going to make sure that we cover all of the essential options so that when
you start working on the exercise you won’t finish up having to sort of go back and redo things
later on.

So to access Project Options the normal way is to go into Backstage View and right at the bottom
you have Options and that brings up the Project Options dialogue. You’ve seen this already
because there are various points where you get taken to this dialogue, often to a specific page on
this dialogue and you are given the opportunity there to change something or set something. So
you may well recall when we were looking at Quick Access Toolbar, for example, we went to
this Quick Access Toolbar page and used the controls on this page to add a button to the Quick
Access Toolbar, that Bold button. In fact I think I’ll remove that Bold button now. And we also
removed a couple of other buttons that we didn’t need.

Now what we’re going to do in this section is go systematically through these pages and look at
the options that we need to get set straightaway.

Now in order to demonstrate the way that many of the options work I’m going to do a quick
demo in relation to what’s called Screen Tip Style. The very top entry on the first page, the
General page of options, User Interface Options, Screen Tip Style, Show Feature Descriptions in
Screen Tips. If I click on the dropdown here there are three options: Show feature descriptions in
Screen Tips, Don’t show feature descriptions in Screen Tips, Don’t show Screen Tips. Now at
the moment with that first option selected, let’s go back to that. Just click on OK. If I hover over
one of the buttons on the Ribbon I get a Screen Tip, Move Task, Move the selected task forward.
You can also move the task to when the resources are available, etcetera. Now let me go back
into the Options and let me change that to Don’t show feature descriptions, click on OK. OK
generally saves any changes that I’ve made. Let me hover over Move again. And now all I get is
Move Task. So that’s the name of the command but not a description of what it does. If I go back
into Options again, obviously if I chose the third option, Don’t show Screen Tips, I wouldn’t
even see the Screen Tip with the name of that particular command. So let me put that back at its

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

previous setting, the original setting, and that’s really the principle on which many of these
options work.

Now let’s look at some of the other key ones on this General page. The default view for me is
Gantt with Timeline. I pointed that out to you a couple of times. That’s the default view when I
open up Project, particularly start working on a new project that’s what I see. And I also can
choose here my default Date Format which is the short form of the day of the week with and then
month, day, year. Various other Date Formats to choose from Choose the one that you prefer.

My User Name is here with my initials. Now you may think well what difference does that
make? If you’re collaborating with other people on projects, if you’re sharing projects and so on
you may do things like Comment on projects. You may make certain other changes to projects
which are identified as being by you. And having your user name and initials set correctly here
enables other people to track that it was you that made that change or made that comment.

Now if you remember right back near the beginning of the course I talked about the fact that one
of the new features in Project 2016 was the availability of some alternative Office Themes. And
this is where you can choose the Office Theme. Now I’ve currently got Colorful. If I selected
Dark Gray, clicked on OK. It’ll basically change my Office Theme to that Dark Gray Office
Theme. I think that’s probably quite difficult for you to see the video so I’m just going to go
back in and change it back to the way that it was. But again you might want to experiment with
that to see which of those Themes you prefer.

And something else that I mentioned earlier on in the course is that you can suppress the
showing of the Start Screen. And you do that by unchecking this box. If I uncheck that, click on
OK to save the change. Next time I start Project I won’t see the Start Screen. Again, that’s
something for you to try out to see if you are happier with that arrangement.

Whatever changes are made, as always, I click on OK to save them.

And just incidentally while I talked about that particular change, most changes that you make in
Project Options are activated when you click OK to close the Project Options dialogue. There are
a small number of changes where you do need to restart Project for them to take effect. But when
it is necessary to restart Project it does actually tell you that you need to restart Project for the
change to take effect.

The next page I want to look at is the Display page and there are two important options here at
this stage. First of all for each project that you work on you can set the currency options. At the
moment we only have Project 1 here and the dropdown here lets me choose from the available
projects. So there’s only Project 1. And I can set a symbol, the decimal digits, the currency, and
so on here.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

And the second option on this page, again going back to something that I mentioned earlier on, if
don’t see the Entry Bar it’s probably because this option down here for Entry Bar is unchecked.
Make sure that’s checked and you’ll see the Entry Bar between the Ribbon and the Timeline.

Now the next page is the Schedule page and there are a couple of very important settings here
which I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to set based on trusting what I’m telling you at the
moment. I’m going to explain these settings to you a little bit later on in the course. But at the
outset I’d like you to have them set in a particular way.

Now there are some very straightforward settings on this page. So for instance, the week starts
on a Sunday, the fiscal year starts on January. You may be tempted to do things like change the
default start time and end time for working days where you work, hours per day, hours per week,
etcetera. By all means set those if you want to. I will be talking about those and calendars in
general in a bit of detail later on. At this stage it’s not really that important that you get them
quite right just at the moment.

Two settings I do want you to set in a particular way though are these, first of all. New task
created manually scheduled. I’ve mentioned that before. I’ve currently got New task created
manually scheduled. I want you to set that to auto-scheduled. And it’s very likely that for most of
you this will be the way to leave this settings set in the longer term. And what this basically
means is that when you create a task in a project it becomes auto-schedule which means that as
you schedule the project or in many cases as Project 2016 schedules the project this one is
automatically scheduled according to all of the constraints, dependencies, resource availability,
all the other factors that come into force this task will be scheduled accordingly. If you leave this
set at manually scheduled for new tasks then each task that created is manually scheduled and
each task that you create either has to individually be changed to auto-schedule or you have to
manually schedule each task. There may be situations in which manually schedule is what you
want and I’ll talk about that later on. But for the moment I want you to make sure that’s set at
auto-schedule.

The other setting that I want you to make sure is set in a particular way is down here where it
says Calculation. Calculate project after each edit on or off. Now I’d like you to make sure that is
set to On, which means that each time we make a change to the schedule Project 2016 will
automatically calculate the effects of that change without you having to take a separate
calculation stop. Now I’ll explain more of the significance of that setting later on in the course as
well. But basically for the moment just bear in mind that Project 2016 has to do a lot, particularly
in a large project, to work out how to schedule things and each time you make a change you
really need to see the affects that change has had potentially on whole parts of the project. And if
you don’t have that set to On you have to separately and as a manual exercise tell Project 2016 to
calculate the project, i.e., to reschedule it. So for the moment I’d like you to set that to On as
well. And as I say with both of those settings I’ll explain more later on.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

The next page is the Proofing page and that relates to Spellchecking and Auto-Correction as
you’re typing. I’m not going to go through this at this stage. But if you’ve used the Proofing
facilities in other components of Microsoft Office such as Microsoft Word I’m sure you’ll be
able to go through there and make the appropriate settings for you.

Now we come to the Save page and there are a couple of very important settings here. One of
them is the default file location. And this is the location where any Project files that you save
will be saved to by default. It’s set when you install Project 2016 to one of the folders within in
your personal Windows directory. You may want to leave it set there or you may want to save
your Project files by default somewhere else, entirely your decision. Mine is currently set to save
in the default location.

The next option is the AutoSave option. And if you’ve used other components of Microsoft
Office you might be tempted to switch AutoSave on. And that will cause Project 2016 to save
your work at regular intervals according to the number of minutes selected in this box. Now you
may well be tempted to switch that on but I don’t and there is a good reason for that. Unlike
other components of Microsoft Office you have AutoSave switched on each time AutoSave
occurs it clears your Undo history. So once an AutoSave happens you cannot then Undo. Now
for some people they’re quite happy to work on that principle. Perhaps they don’t use Undo very
much or perhaps they’re very careful. You can in fact use this option for a prompt to warn you
when an AutoSave is about to happen. But in my case I prefer to leave AutoSave switched off.
But ultimately it’s your choice.

The next page also has very important settings. And this page determines the language that
you’re using to work in Microsoft Project. Now you can have more than one language installed
and you can select different ones for different situations. I have English (United States) and
English (United Kingdom) as the two languages that I use. They are sufficiently different to
warrant being described as two different languages. My default is set at English (United States).
If you need to add an additional language it’s very straightforward. There’s a dropdown here
which gives you access to many, many, many more languages. And in a particular case with a
particular project most people find that their default language is the one they use most of the
time. But if you do work in more than one language, even if the two languages are two versions
of English, you do need to be aware of this language setting. And when you’re working on a
project make sure that you have the appropriate language selected.

Now let me quickly run through the remaining pages of Project Options. There are no settings on
the Advanced page that you need to worry about now. We will be looking at one or two settings
from here later on.

Customize Ribbon is the equivalent of the customization page for the Quick Access Toolbar and
it looks quite similar. The main difference is that rather than say selecting commands from the
list on the left and adding them to what was the Quick Access Toolbar on the right what you

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

would normally do is create your own tab, add your own groups to it and then copy commands
from the left hand list to your groups on your new tab. And then as in the example that I showed
you earlier on with the two tabs on my Ribbon, Reporting and Team, you could build up your
own custom tabs on the Ribbon. Now I’m not going to cover that now but by all means have a
look at the help, give it a try and see how you get on with it. Don’t forget you can always click
the Reset button to put things back how they were if things go horribly wrong.

Quick Access Toolbar page you’ve already seen and you’ve seen me use it. Add-Ins are out of
scope for this course. And the Trust Center is sort of out of scope for this course. There’s one
thing I would like to say about it. In Project 2016 mainly the Trust Center is concerned with the
fact that one way that people can get malicious content onto your computer is to get you to run
macros. And macros can be included within Microsoft Project files. Make sure that you have the
setting here for macro settings at Disable all macros with notification. And then if you open a
Project file from somebody else and it says, “I want to run a macro.” I you know who the person
is that you’ve got the Project file from and you absolutely trust the source you can let the macro
run, but if not you can say, “Nope, I’m not going to let that macro run.”

So that’s it. That’s the basics, the overview of Project Options. And we’re going to be looking at
quite a few others as we go along. Please make sure that you’ve got set the ones that I said you
should have set. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Chapter 5 – Task Basics

Video: Entering Tasks

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m going to start work on the project plan for a wedding. Now of course different
people would have very different opinions on what might be part of the arrangements for a
wedding. So what I’m going to try to do is to come up with a project plan for a wedding that has
enough detail in it to be reasonably realistic but which will also reflect the different styles of
wedding that you may get in different parts of the world, in different cultures and so on. Having
said that the style of wedding that I’m planning here is not one that’s associated with any
particular religion, for example.

Now what you’re going to be doing from very soon onwards is planning the refit of a bathroom
in a domestic house. So what I’m going to try to show you while I’m doing this wedding plan is
some of the ideas that I want you to incorporate into building up the plan for the bathroom refit.

You may well find when you’re looking at either of these projects that they don’t really reflect
how you would set about doing them but really that’s not the point. You’re learning the tools in
Microsoft Project to do these things and you’re not actually learning how to either plan a
wedding or refit a bathroom.

Another important point to make here is that we’re building these things up in layers. I’m not
going to go deep into the detail straightaway. We will certainly get to the detail but we will do it
one layer at a time and I’ll explain the tools and techniques associated with Project 2016 as we
go.

So first of all I’ve made a list of the main aspects of this wedding plan. Let’s take a look at that
first.

Now I’m sure this isn’t going to be quite right but I’ve made this list. It’s actually in the course
file folder if you want a copy of this list. And it’s planning attire, and by attire I mean basically
the clothes that people are going to wear but it’s probably a little bit broader than that. Guests,
venue, catering, flowers, memories, details, the wedding day itself, and the honeymoon. So
they’re going to be my main headings. And the first thing I’m going to do is to start adding each
of those to my project plan. So let’s take the first one, planning, and set that one up first.

So I’ve created a new blank project and in the task name I enter Planning. Now a couple of
things to point out here. I’m using Gantt Chart View. And I did show you briefly earlier on in the
course a couple of ways of switching to Gantt Chart View if you’ve not got Gantt Chart View on
already. One way is to use one of the buttons down towards the right hand end of the Status Bar
but you can also go to the View Tab and select Gantt Chart View there. Another thing to bear in

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

mind is that you should have new tasks set at auto-scheduled or what I’m going to do next won’t
work for you. So having entered Planning as the task name I press the Tab key and a number of
fields are filled in for my first task. One of them is the duration. And by default a task has a
duration of one day with a question mark, normally. Now what the question mark means is that
this is an estimated duration. And what one normally does is to leave the duration as an estimate
until you have actually got a reasonably reliable duration for that task. Now at this stage I’m not
going to worry about durations at all. I’m just going to get all of those tasks in. But bear in mind
those question marks are a good way of reminding myself that that’s just an estimate of the
duration. And believe me planning a wedding is a lot longer than a one day task.

Ignore work for the moment and let’s look at start. And you can just about see that the start date
is Thursday, December the 17th. Now one thing that may already be annoying you is being able
to see the contents of all of these fields. So let’s deal with that first.

If you need to make these columns wider or narrower, if you hover over the header, the gray part
here, and go to the vertical line between two fields you’ll see the cursor change to a double
arrow. If you click with the mouse at that point and drag one way or the other you can make the
columns wider and narrower. Now in that way you can make sure that you can see the contents
of any particular column at any particular time. We’ll do a little bit more work on how to format
Gantt Charts, how to lay them out more neatly later on. But for the moment that’s probably one
of the most important things you need to be able to do. So just practice making those columns
narrower and wider so that you can see things a little bit more conveniently.

And also there is a bar, a vertical dividing line between the table on the left and the chart on the
right. If you hover over that anyway you get a slightly different double arrow and you can
change that divider so that you can see more or less of the table, more or less of the chart. And
again you need to get used to adjusting those to suit your specific requirements.

Now let’s go back to this start date, Thursday, December 17th. Now by default new tasks are
created either on project start date or on the current date. Now in this case both of those are
today. You can check which it’s set to by looking at Project Options on the Schedule page. I
suggest you have a quick look at that now. It’s immediately under where you said new tasks are
auto-scheduled. And you’ll see in this case that it says Project start date. So what is the project
start date?

By default project start date is the date I create the project. And I created this project today so it’s
today, Thursday, December the 17th. If you click on the Project Tab on the Ribbon in the
Properties Group normally the first button there is Project Information. Click on Project
Information and one of the basic pieces of project information is the start date. And that is the
start date, Thursday, December 17, 2015. It will also tell you in this case what the finish date is.
Now of course I haven’t really got much work scheduled on this project at the moment so it

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

means that I can start planning this wedding today and I can actually have the wedding today as
well because I’ll be ready. Believe me that situation will not last much longer.

And going back to what I was just saying now about Project Options, you can see here that we’re
scheduling from project start date. Some projects might be scheduled from the project finish
date. Now it’s very conventional to start a project and say when will I be ready, but it also pretty
often happens that you know when you’ve got to be finished by and what you really need to
know is when should you start. You can do both of those types of scheduling in Project 2016 but
it’s very important to know at any time whether you’re scheduling from the start date or to the
finish date. The approach we’re taking now with planning this wedding is that we are starting at
a start date and when we’ve done all the planning and got all the other activities in we’ll know
when we can be ready by. So we haven’t got a date for the wedding yet. We need to do a lot of
work, to do a lot of planning first, but we will find out when we would be ready to have the
wedding by.

So let me cancel this dialogue for now and I’m going to put in a couple more of the tasks in my
project.

Okay I’ve got three tasks in there now. You may be slightly surprised by how my plan looks but
there are very good reasons for it. At the moment I have not told Project 2016 much about these
tasks at all. I haven’t, for instance, said that Attire must happen after Planning or that Guests
must happen after Attire. So it has no reason to put these tasks in sequence.

A very important point here as well is that you don’t actually have to enter the tasks of a project
in chronological sequence. I could put all of these in any order that I wanted to. But the
convention is that the tasks you expect to at least start first go first in the list.

Now in the left hand column here you have something called a Task ID. And as you’ll see later
on in the course Task IDs fulfill a very important purpose. But one way of looking at this is that
generally speaking the convention is that the task with the lower IDs correspond to the tasks that
are performed earliest in the project. Having said that and as you’ll see later on with this wedding
plan the individual elements that make up each of these tasks, and bear in mind we’re going to
break each of these tasks down as we go through, will overlap some of the things that we thought
were going to be earlier on will be later on and so on. And in any case as the project progresses
things will tend to change. So having the earliest tasks as the ones with the lowest ID numbers is
more of a sort of general guideline than any sort of specific rule.

The next thing I’m going to do is to put in the rest of those tasks.

And there we are. I have all of those headings in. All of them have an estimated duration of one
day which is clearly not the case. But we have a starting point for our plan. And having done that
work the next most important thing to do is to save this plan and that’s what we’re going to do
first in the next section. So I’ll see you then.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Opening and Closing Projects

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m going to look at opening and closing projects. And before I do that the very
first thing I need to do is to save the first version of the wedding plan. And I’m going to talk
more about saving in a couple of sections time. For the moment I’m going to save this to the
course file folder with a very straightforward file name and then we’re going to concentrate on a
bit of opening and closing for now. And I’ll tell you more about Save later.

So in order to save this project go to Backstage View, click on Save As. Save As brings up a
Save As page. And exactly what you see here will depend on what Save As locations are
available to you. I have SharePoint sites available to me. I have a couple of OneDrive locations
available to me. And I have of course the PC that I’m working on. Now depending on how your
defaults are set you will by default be offered one of the available options. On this occasion I’m
not going to accept my default of saving to a SharePoint task list. I’m going to save it to my PC.
And that’s what I want you to do as well whenever you save files.

Now when I click on this PC I’ll normally see a list of folders that are either default folders or
ones that I’ve used recently. Now I don’t actually want to use any of those folders so I’m
actually going to the bottom here and I’m going to browse to the folder that I want. Once I’ve
used that folder, and that’s the course file folder in my case, that will appear on this Save As list
under this PC next time. So I’m going to click on Browse and then browse to the course file
folder.

Now at the moment the course file folder is empty as far as the Save As type that I’m using is
concerned. And my default Save As type is set to MPP. That should be your default Save As
type as well. So all I need to do now is to give my project file a name. So the extension will be
MPP and the name I’m going to give it is SSI Wedding 01. Click on Save. Now when I’ve saved
that file the file name appears in the header of Microsoft Project 2016 at the top there to remind
me of what the name is. And if I would now to save this or any other project using the approach
that I’ve just taken. So if I do again File, Save As and click on this PC that course files folder
now appears in the list of Save As locations.

Now there’s a couple of important things to note about these sort of lists of locations and lists of
files and so on. And that is that as you work more and more with Project 2016 obviously these
lists are going to tend to get longer and things will start to drop off the bottom of the list. Now
there’s a little pin on the right here and if you click that you can pin items to the list. I anticipate
that I’m going to be saving a lot of items to the course files folder. I don’t want it to drop off the
bottom of any list so I’m going to pin it to this list to make sure that it stays there. There’s now a
new category here of Pinned. So if you’re going to be working with a couple of folders, the

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

course file folder and the exercise file folder, you may well want to pin them to this and any
other list that you finish up using.

So having saved that project to that folder I’m now going to close it by clicking on the Close
button here and I now have Project 2016 open with no files open.

In a moment I’m going to look at some of the options for opening that wedding project again.
But just before I do let’s go to Project Options, the Advanced page. And I did mention earlier on
that we would be looking at some of these advanced options as we go through the course. There
won’t be time to go through every single thing but I will point out a few of them as we go. And I
do suggest that from time to time you take a browse through these options. For example, on the
Advanced page in the Display section the first option, Show this number of recent projects. In
that way you can control how many projects appear in the Recent list. And below that one of the
options is Show this number of unpinned recent folders. So you have a number of options that
you can experiment with and set to your own requirements there. I’m not going to change my
setting at the moment. But what I am going to do is to exit Project altogether and sort of pretend
it’s the next day and come back in and see what happens as I start up Project.

Well when I start up Project I can of course see the wedding project in my recent projects list.
But I’m not going to open that at the moment. What I’m going to do is to start a new blank
project. And whilst I’m working on my new blank project I decide that I need to look at the
wedding project. Now I don’t need to close this project. I can have more than one project open at
once. So I’m going to go to File, Open, and of course there in my Recent files list is the wedding
project. I might choose to pin it to that list. Remember what I pinned before was the folder not
the individual project. Now I’m not going to pin this on this occasion but I am going to select the
wedding project, open it now. Obviously if I needed to use Browse or this PC or go to any other
location that’s fine. And that gives me many options for opening existing projects. So I click on
Wedding 01 and I’ve now got two projects open. There’s absolutely no problem with having two
or more projects open other than switching between them and that’s what we’re going to look at
next.

There are a number of ways of switching between open projects. There are ways within Project
and there are ways within Windows as well.

Now the ways within Windows of switching between open projects to some extent depend on
whether you’re using Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1 or 10. One way is to use the well-known Alt-Tab
way of cycling through the running programs. Another way, and this I’m going to demonstrate in
Windows 10, is if I move the mouse over the Project icon on the Task Bar I can see the two open
projects. And all I need to do is to click on the one I want to work on and I’ll switch into that
project and then obviously switch back just choose the other one.

Within Project itself the way of doing this is if you go to the View Tab, in the Window Group
towards the right hand end one of the options is Switch Windows. And if you click there you’ll

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

see a list of the open projects. And all you need to do is to select the one that you want to work
on and then you’ll be taken into that one. So there’s a couple of options there for switching
between open projects.

So by now you should have enough tools and techniques to create a project, save it, close it, open
it again, work on more than one project at a time. And it’s time for you to do the first course
exercise. That’s what I’m going to set you in the next section so please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 01

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m setting you Exercise 01 on the course. The information you need for Exercise
01 is in the Exercise folder. It’s a text file, Exercise 01 Major Tasks.txt. And that list, the major
tasks, the major headings for the bathroom refit that you’re going to plan. So I’d like you to use
that list and produce a Microsoft Project 2016 project like this.

Now note the name that I’ve given my sample answer, Simon Sez IT, etcetera, Project 2016
Exercise 01. All of the sample answers that I provide will be in that same exercise folder. So
make sure you finish up with something pretty close to mine. I appreciate that the start date for
you will be a different start date than mine. That won’t matter as you’ll see as we go along.

That’s it for this section. Please join me in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Task Properties

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section we’re going to look at some other basic properties of tasks. And I’m going to
return to that first version of the wedding plan. And the first thing I want to look at is the
duration of a task. Now if I look at that first task, the one with the name Planning, and click in
the duration field, the duration as I explained earlier has a default value of one day with a
question mark indicating that it is an estimated duration. I can use these little rollers to increase
the duration. Note that as soon as I do that what Project assumes I mean is that the estimation
part of it is gone and I’m now saying, for example, that that is a two day task. And of course I
can increase that duration pretty much as much as I want to. Or if I decided I’ve overdone it I can
decrease it again.

Now I don’t have to use those rollers. If I, for instance, went to the Attire field I can literally
click in that field and type a date either looking at the field itself as I do it or of course looking at
the entry bar. So I could for example say three days and tick that. And as you can see as I adapt
and adjust the duration of the tasks the bar in the Gantt Chart on the right extends accordingly.

Now we haven’t actually looked at the definition of working days and working weeks and
working hours yet but you can probably see from that that when I’m talking about, for example,
an eight day task I’m talking about eight working days and that doesn’t include days at the
weekend with the current calendar that I’m using on this project.

Now look very carefully at the Bar Chart on the right because for the tasks that still have a one
day estimated duration you’ll see that at the right hand end of each of those you’ve got that
vertical line. Now it’s pretty much coincidence that it’s at the right hand end of those bars. That
vertical line indicates the current date. That’s the today line. So at any point you can see where
today is in relation to the project. Or if you like where the project is in relation to today.

And we talked already about project start date. Supposing I was entering this project and in fact
the various aspects of it had started a couple of weeks ago. I’m a bit late setting the project up in
Project 2016. So some of these things have happened already. What I could do is to change the
project start date. So look, for example, at that first planning task, Thursday, December 17th, the
start date. That’s the date that I entered it yesterday and that is currently the start date for this
project. Let’s go into the Project Information and change the start date to a date two weeks ago,
December the 4th. Click on OK. None of the durations have changed but each of the tasks has a
new start date.

Now of course I could change individual task start dates. So for instance, if I wanted to change
the date that Attire task is starting, if I click in the start field and click on the dropdown I get a
Date Picker. And if I decided well we’re going to need to look at Attire. We’re going to need to
start to sort clothes out but we’re not really going to be able to do that until after the Christmas

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

holiday. So let me go right on the month there. Let’s go into January and let’s say that we’re
going to start that on say Tuesday, the 5th of January. So that’s when that task is going to start.

Now in doing that one of the problems I have is that that task is now shut off to the right in my
chart and I can no longer see it. That may or may not be a problem but you know how to resolve
that already because you know about the Zoom Slider. So let’s zoom out a bit. That’s better.
Now I can see that Attire task in January 2016.

And of course if I wanted to I could not only set the duration of each of these tasks but I could
start to actually set them out in time. So for instance I could decide on a wedding day and
assuming that I’m confident we’d be ready for that I could plot that at some time next year as
well. And similarly for each of those other tasks I could set up duration, I could decide on a start
date and I could start to put my project plan together with a lot more care and attention and
hopefully with a lot more resemblance to what actually is going to happen.

And that is indeed what we are going to be doing over the next quite a few sections. However,
this project if it just comprised those roughly ten tasks would not be a very realistic project. And
so we need to put in a lot more detail to make this into a realistic planning exercise. Now in order
to do that you need to know quite a lot more about tasks. You need to know about dependencies
and you need to know about resources. And one of the next things I’m going to tell you about, in
fact I’m going to start on that in the next section, is you need to understand summary tasks and
outlining.

But for the balance of this section I want to look just at information about tasks. We’ve seen task
name, duration, start date, finish date. I mentioned work once or twice. But in fact for any task in
Project 2016 there is an awful lot of information about that task available and that you may need
to be able to manipulate in some way.

Now I’ve got the Attire task selected and what I’m going to do is to right click on that row, bring
up the contextual menu, and one of the options about fourth from the bottom there is
Information. I’m going to click on Information. And it brings up the Task Information dialogue.

Now this is a dialogue with half a dozen tabs and each tab has information about the selected
task. Much of the information won’t mean very much at the moment. By the end of the course
most of it will. And some things, I think the descriptions you can see here, pretty much explain
what that particular piece of task information is about. So for instance, you know about name but
percent complete how much of that task have we done? We haven’t done any of it, 0% complete.
It’s an auto-scheduled task. I briefly explained what that means. You can see the start date and
the finish date there. It’s not an estimated duration so that checkbox is ticked. Three day task and
it has a priority of 500. Now the other properties on this particular tab are ones we’re going to be
looking at later on. But let’s look at the other tabs. What are its predecessors? Which tasks must
happen before this one? Or in some way that it depends on? Which resources does it use?
There’s also an Advanced Tab with information like deadlines, constraints, specific calendars to

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

use and so on. Virtually all of these we’re going to be looking at during the course. We can
record notes about the task and we can even set up custom fields with custom information about
the task.

So that’s the Task Information for the Attire task. Let me Cancel that and just point out
something I’ve mentioned a couple of times before.

Task Information is a good example of something which you can get at in a variety of different
ways. So with that same Attire task selected if I go to the Task Tab on the Ribbon there is a
button in the Properties Group, Information, that brings up exactly the same dialogue. And in
fact if I double click on the task that brings up that dialogue as well. So there are many ways of
bringing up task information. But access to that dialogue and the contents of it are going to be
very important to you. And if you want to do a little bit of extra reading note the Help button
there.

That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Chapter 6 – Subtasks
Video: Subtasks

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section we’re going to look at summary tasks and outlining and I’m going to use the
wedding project and demonstrate how we can build up the level of detail and the structure of this
project.

Now I mentioned a couple of times already that the tasks that I currently have in the project,
planning, attire, guests, etcetera, are actually high level tasks. They really represent groups of
tasks. And what we’re going to start to do now is to break each of those high level tasks, what
we’re going to call summary tasks, down into individual tasks or subtasks. By the end of this
section we’ll have a much more detailed project. But to get us started I want to look at one
particular summary task.

Before I really get started I want to point out two things. First of all, if you were doing a
breakdown of the tasks involved in a wedding project, particularly if you’re doing it from
scratch, you would almost certainly come up with a different breakdown to me. And in fact just
about everybody who tries to do this comes out with a different breakdown. So there isn’t a sort
of right answer here. It’s important that all of the necessary tasks in the project are represented
ultimately in the project plan. But the way you do this breakdown will be a very subjective way
indeed.

And the second thing to point out is although I’m going to add quite a bit of detail to this
wedding project plan I could add a lot more. We’re going to finish up with something of the
order of somewhere between say 50 and 100 tasks in total. But if you really were doing this very,
very thoroughly there would probably be hundreds and hundreds of tasks.

So the task I’m going to breakdown is the Guests task.

Now if I select the task underneath it, Venue, and right click on Venue and click on Insert Task I
get a new task above Venue and that is actually going to be one of my guests subtasks. It gets a
default name. Note new task there between chevron markers. And then default values for
duration, etcetera.

Now what I’m going to put as the name of that task, I just click in the Entry Bar and type the
name in, is Make guest list. So that is my first guest related task.

Now the important thing here is that this is actually a subtask of my Guests task. And in order to
indicate that it’s a subtask I’m going to demote it in my task hierarchy. There is a button in the
Schedule Group on the Task Tab. Let me hover over it and it says Indent Task. And indenting

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

that task automatically demotes it within the hierarchy. Watch what happens when I do that.
Now not only does Make guest list get indented and that clearly indicates that it is a subtask of
Guests but a number of other things happen as well. One of them is that Guests becomes bold,
indicating that it is a summary task. And it also gets a tiny little wedge next to it. And we can use
that wedge to expand and collapse the guests summary task. If I click on the wedge now I only
see the summary task Guests. In order to see the subtasks, in this case there is only one subtask
and that is Make guest list, I use the wedge, so I expand and collapse with that wedge.

Now what I’m going to do is to put in the second subtask. Again I’m going to click on Venue.
I’m going to right click and once again insert task. This new task clearly goes above Venue again
but it also inherits the indentation level, what we call the Outline level of the task above it. So it
automatically becomes a subtask of Guests because it gets the same indentation level as Make
guest list. So let me type in now the name of that second task. Now you can see there how the
text is wrapped. I need my task name column to be a little bit wider. So let me widen that out a
little. If when I enter this, Send out invitation was not actually meant to be a subtask of Guests all
I need to do is make sure I’ve got that task selected and then one of the other buttons in the
Schedule Group on the Task Tab is Outdent Task. And that would as we say promote Send out
invitations to itself be a summary task. Clearly a summary task with no subtasks at the moment.
But I do want it to be a subtask of Guests so let me just indent it again and let me put in the third
and fourth subtasks.

So having entered the fourth subtask let me just point out something else here. Let me right click
on Book guest accommodation. Note that indent and outdent buttons are actually on the mini
toolbar here. So you could use that. And as usual as you’re working in Project 2016 Project itself
offers you the most likely commands on either the contextual menu or the mini toolbar. So keep
eye open for those because they often give you a very quick way of working on a task like this.

Now at this point you may feel inclined to work out how long each of these tasks is going to take
and when each of them needs to happen and so on. I don’t want you to worry about any of those
things at the moment. We’re going to come back to durations and time scales and dependencies
and so on as we go through the next sections on the course. All I want to do at the moment is to
put in the structure of the project and then we’ll start to add the detail a little bit later on.

Having said that there’s one more thing I need to show you here about summary tasks. Let me go
to Make guest list and I’m going to increase the duration to eight days. Now if you look over at
the Gantt Chart itself you’ll see that the Make guest list task is indeed now eight days long. But
you’ll also see that the summary task no longer has the same type of bar representing it as a
standard subtask. The summary task has a different format bar on the right there. Now we’re
going to talk about Gantt Chart formatting much later on and you can in fact change most aspects
of the formatting of these bars anyway.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

But there’s two important things. One of them is that the summary task does have a different
format of bar which helps it stand out on the right there. But also the summary task by default
does not have a duration of its own. The duration of the summary task is actually the duration
from when its first subtask starts right through to when its latest subtask ends. So the duration of
the summary task is in effect dictated by the scheduling of its subtasks.

What I’m going to do now is to insert the rest of the subtasks for this particular project. Now if
you’d like to actually do this yourself rather than use the sample file, the demo file that I’ll tell
you about towards the end of this section, there is a text file in the course file folder. And that
lists each of the subtasks under its relevant summary task. So if you want a bit of practice you
could go through and set these up. This is what you’ll see in that text file. It’s called SSI-Project-
2016-Wedding-Task-Breakdown.txt.

So here is the revised wedding plan. This will be the version that I’ll save as Wedding 02, if you
want to just take a look at it and perhaps compare it with a version that you’ve made yourself.
And there’s one other area now we need to look. And in order to look at that area what I’m going
to do is to add even more detail to this temporarily. I’m going to take the task Select and order
wedding dress and I’m going to break that down into three further subtasks.

So the first subtask is going to be Select wedding dress, indent that, and then two further
subtasks. Now as you can see these three further subtasks are Select wedding dress, Order dress
and Measurements and fittings. And we might, for example, breakdown Measurements and
fittings into Measurements and then First fitting and Second fitting or something like that. So as
you can see even at this early stage of planning the wedding we’re starting to get quite a deep
structure to the plan.

Now when you’re looking at a plan like this, and bearing in mind that we’ve still only got round
about, what, just under 50 tasks in total, the highest ID number there is 43. If we really went in
and put in all of the detail actually making your way around this plan would start to get quite
complicated because it will look more and more complicated. We haven’t even started yet on
durations and assigning resources and putting in dependencies and time constraints and so on. So
there’ll be much more detail to add. And it’s usually the case when you start to increase the size
of a project that you only want to look at certain parts at certain times or even that you only want
to look at the project at a certain level. Now there is a straightforward way of determining the
level of detail that you see in a plan such as this one.

What I’m going to do is to scroll back up to the top of the plan. I’m going to select the Attire
summary task. That’s the task with ID 4. And then on the View Tab I’m going to go to the Data
Group and there is an Outline button. If you look at the description there, the Screen Tip
description, Specify which outline level should be used in the view. For a large project you may
want to collapse everything to outline level 1 or 2 and then expand only the sections that interest
you. If I have Attire selected and click on the bottom of this Outline button, let’s see what

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

happens if I say Hide Subtasks. You now only see Attire and all subtasks and all levels below it
are hidden. Let’s go back to the Outline button again. Now if I want to show the subtasks again I
can just click on Show Subtasks.

Now in fact I can apply the same principle to the whole project. So if I click on the bottom of the
Outline button and say click on Level 1, Show outline level 1 look what happens. I see
everything just at level 1. If I click on it and say level 2 I see everything at level 2. But note with
Task ID 5, Select and order wedding dress under Attire, level 2 means that I don’t see its
subtasks. I only see the level 2 task Select and order wedding dress.

So as you can see the summary tasks like Planning and Attire and Guests are at what we call
level 1 and the level below that is level 2 and so on. There is in Project 2016 a level zero. And
level zero is actually pretty important so let me show you what level zero is.

If you go the Gantt Chart Tools Format Tab, towards the right hand end in the Show/Hide Group
there is a checkbox for Project Summary Task. And the Project Summary Task has some very
important uses, some of which we’re going to look at during this course. So I’m going to check
that which switched on the Project Summary Task. You can see there that the name of the task is
basically the name of the file at the moment. So it’s SSI-Wedding-02. And there is a duration for
the Project Summary Task which is in effect the duration of the project. And as we’ll see there
are many aspects of the project that we need to use the Project Summary Task in order to deal
with. But more on those things later.

I can select the Project Summary Task. And if I went back to the View Tab and the Outline
button and said Hide Subtasks, bearing in mind that this applies to the selected task, I would hide
all subtasks and I would only see the Project Summary Task itself. Let me show those again.

And then finally since I’ve put in the subtasks of task five here, Select and order wedding dress. I
think I will leave those in for now. They may be useful to us a little bit later on.

So that’s it on summary tasks and outlining. Please join me for Exercise 02 in the next section.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 02

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’d like you to take the information in the file in the exercise folder, Project-2016-
Exercise-02-Task-Breakdown.txt and use that to create the fuller version of the bathroom refit
project with structure. So for example in the Planning summary task there are six subtasks,
Scoping, Select style, etcetera. And what you should produce will be hopefully similar to my
sample answer to Exercise 02.

Now notice I’ve still only got one day estimated as the duration of each task. But my project now
has structure. And in particular note the Project Summary Task right at the top there, the task
with ID 0.

So that’s it for Exercise 02. My sample answer is in the usual place. I’ll see you in the next
section.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Chapter 7 – Dependencies, Deadlines and Milestones

Video: Linking and Unlinking Tasks

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section we’re going to look at dependencies. And as we’re doing that we’re going to add
quite a bit more detail to the plan for the wedding.

A Dependency reflects the fact that some things happening depend on other things happening.
The way in which they depend can be quite complex but in a very simplest type of dependency
we would say that one task cannot start until another task finishes. But we can have much
complex dependencies than that. And in particular one task may depend on many other tasks.

Now let’s take a pretty straightforward Dependency to begin with. Let’s look at task six and
seven, Select wedding dress and Order dress. Now clearly you’re not going to order the dress
until you’ve selected it. But as soon as you’ve selected it you may want to order it. If I want to
record in my schedule that one task is dependent on another the very simplest way of doing it, let
me select the first task which is six, Select wedding dress, hold the Control key down, press
seven, Order dress, and then on the Task Tab in the Schedule Group there is a button, a chain-
link button that says Link the selected tasks. You can link tasks so one can’t start until the other
has finished. And this establishes the very simplest kind of dependency.

If you look at the Gantt Chart on the right you can see an arrow indicating the dependency
whereby task six must finish. You can see the arrow there starting, coming out of the finish of
task six. And you can see it going into the start of task seven, Order dress.

And if I pull the divider over here you’ll be able to see the contents of this predecessors column.
And for task seven it now has a predecessor of task six.

Now let’s look at the durations of these tasks. Let’s go back to Select wedding dress. This is
obviously very difficult to be absolute about but let’s suppose that the bride has decided that in
order to select a wedding dress. It’s really quite a long and complex process. She’s probably
going to need a couple of months. So let’s say that in terms of working days, weekday working
days, I appreciate that somebody wouldn’t be planning a wedding purely on the basis of weekday
working but let’s work on that basis for the moment. Let’s call it eight weeks. Let’s call it 40
days. So if I click in the Select wedding dress task, go to the duration, I’m going to delete what’s
there already and replace it with 40 days. That’s fine. But in terms of ordering the dress. That’s a
very quick task. That’s going to be a matter of perhaps going into a store and filling in a form,
committing to spending a certain amount of money. Probably paying a deposit on the dress.
We’ll talk about things like cost later on. And we’re really going to say that that order is going to
be placed in a day. So let’s change one day estimated to one day without estimated. We can

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

either just delete the question mark or as you saw earlier on we can go into the Task Information
dialogue and uncheck the estimated checkbox.

Now once the dress has been ordered the measurements and fittings can start. There’ll be a
sequence of these until the dress is finalized. And once again let’s assume that it’s going to take a
total period of 40 days for that to all happen. So we can select task seven and we can select task
eight. We could create a Dependency in exactly the way that we did before. If I right click on the
selection, if you look in the mini toolbar there’s a link button there. So I can do the link that way.
And I can do the link before I establish the second duration. So let me double click on task eight,
change its duration to not estimated and 40 days. There we are. And at the end of task eight we
should have a wedding dress that fits.

Now let’s move on to task nine, Select and order bridesmaid dresses. Now this is not a task
which is completely independent of the wedding dress because as I understand it in general the
wedding dress would be selected first with a thought to what the bridesmaid dresses will be like.
But you certainly wouldn’t start selecting the bridesmaid dresses till you were certain about the
wedding dress. So let’s in this case say that the Dependency is that we’ll select the wedding dress
before we select and order the bridesmaid dresses. Now in reality not only would Select and
order bridesmaid dresses itself be broken down into subtasks but even some of those subtasks
would probably be broken down further. So for instance measurements and fittings would
probably be broken down into two or three subtasks. But let’s stick with the level of detail that
we’ve got. Let’s establish that link and change the duration of the Select and order bridesmaid
dresses from an estimated one day to a total of 60 days. And as you can see our schedule now
takes us towards the end of April 2016. You can also see there that that one task, Select wedding
dress has now a number of tasks dependent on it. And of course any task cannot only have
several tasks depending on it but it can depend on several tasks as well.

Now let’s start to look at these dependencies in a little bit more detail. There is a Dependency
from task six to task nine. We just set that up. If I hover over the arrow that represents that
Dependency there is a Screen Tip that comes up that gives me a summary of the Dependency.
It’s an FS, a finish to start dependency. That means that the first task in the Dependency, that is
Select wedding dress, must F, must finish before Select and order bridesmaid dresses can S, can
start. And in fact if I double click on that line I get a Task Dependency dialogue where I could if
I wanted to change that Dependency.

So it says from Select wedding dress to Select and order bridesmaid dresses there is a finish to
start dependency with a lag of zero days. Now if I had decided in this particular case that after
the wedding dress was selected and at the point that we were going to order it we could certainly
start looking at selecting and ordering bridesmaid dresses but we needed to leave a gap of say
five days for some reason that would represent a lag of five days. And if I then click on that as
my dependency what you’ll see is a five day gap. Effectively we finish Select wedding dress,
then there’s a five day gap and then we Select and order bridesmaid dresses. So that’s a lag. And

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

I could also have said let’s have a lag of minus five days. Now what that is, a negative lag we
often refer to as a lead. We still have a finish to start relationship but what the relationship now
says is that the second task can start five days before the first task finishes. So we can actually
get started on selecting and ordering the bridesmaid dresses five days before we finish selecting
the wedding dress.

Now I’m going to restore that to being a lag of zero days in a moment but first of all I’d like you
to look at the predecessors column. If you look at task seven, Order dress, its predecessor was
six. Look at task eight. Its predecessor was seven. Where all you see in the predecessor column is
a number, that indicates a default finish to start relationship with zero lag. If there’s more
complexity to the Dependency then you’ll see something such as you can see for task nine. The
Dependency is on task six so it begins with a six. The FS basically says this is a finish to start
dependency, which is the default. But the reason it says that is because it then says minus five
days. So that code tells you that task nine has a finish to start relationship with task six which
means that six must finish before nine starts but there is a five day lead. So in effect task nine can
start five days before task six finishes. And whenever there is anything other than a standard
default finish to start relationship, so if it’s any other type of relationship or if there is lag or lead
you’ll see that coded in the predecessors column.

So let me once again open up that dialogue and change that back to being a zero lag. And just
before I change this back the way it was let’s look at those other types of Dependency.

There are four types in total. It’s finish to start, the default. There is start to start which means
that the second task can start when the first one does. Of course you can apply lag or lead to any
of these. Finish to finish which means that the second task can only finish when the first task
finishes. And there is a start to finish which means that the second task can’t finish until the first
task starts.

Now by far the most common Dependency is the finish to start but you are very likely to come
across the others. And in the next section or two I’m going to show you one or two examples of
these other types of Dependency.

The next task that I want to look at is the task of Making the guest list. Now Making the guest
list can be quite a long and controversial subject. I’m going to assume for the moment that it’s
going to take maybe three to four weeks to try to make sure that everybody that should be invited
is invited. So let’s change that eight days to fifteen. But let’s also say that once we’ve got some
guests on the guest list who are definitely going to be invited we might start sending out the
invitations pretty much straightaway. So sending out the invitations would be a task that would
pretty much run throughout the period of Making the guest list. We may even wait and see what
responses we get to some of the invitations until we decide if you like close the guest list. So
let’s extend Send out invitation to be say a 20 day task. And let’s say that it’s going to start five
days after Making the guest list starts. So once we’ve been working on the guest list for a week

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

we’re going to start sending out the first batch of invitations and see what sort of responses we
get. So we’ll link those two. And then what we’re going to do is change that Dependency from
finish to start to start to start and put in a five day lag, start to start.

We need to allow time for people to respond to invitations. As usual quite a controversial
subject, how long you would give people to respond to an invitation. But probably a figure of
something like two or three weeks. So you’re going to start sending out invitations on a
particular date and then over a period of time you’ll send out some more and you’ll start to get
replies back. But in reality you can’t really finalize the guest list until you’ve received all of the
responses to the invitations. So what I’m going to do is to create a link between Send out
invitations and Finalize guest list that works on the principle that you need to allow say three
weeks from the end of sending out the invitations before you can actually finalize the guest list.
So I’m going to create a link between those two and I’m going to put a lag of fifteen days in.
And then instead of saying that it’s a finish to start link I’m going to say it’s a finish to finish
link. And I’m going to say that Finalize guest list is just say a five day task. And what you can
see there is a situation where at some point before our deadline we’re going to start to finalize the
guest list but we’re not actually going to be able to finish it until fifteen days after we’ve sent out
the last invitation. Now of course the way that I’ve done that was partly just to demonstrate these
type of dependency. But you’ll see from that also that when you’re setting up dependencies there
are often a number of options to consider. And coming up with the right sort of dependency can
sometimes involve quite a bit of thought and discussion.

So we’ve put in quite a bit more detail into our plan now for the wedding. In the next section
we’re going to look at Constraints and Deadlines and we’re also going to do a little bit more on
dependencies as well. So please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Setting Constraints and Deadlines

Toby: Hello again and welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

Since we last looked at the wedding plan I’ve added quite a bit more detail to it in terms of the
durations of many of the tasks and quite a few straightforward dependencies. So for example, if
you look down at ID 20, Catering, within that there are two pairs of tasks, Make caterer shortlist
and then Book caterer and Finalize menu. I’ve allowed fifteen days for making a shortlist of
caterers and talking to them, making a decision about which one to book and then finalizing the
menu with them. I’ve allowed fifteen days for each of those tasks. And then I’ve done the same
for the baker, the baker who’s going to make the wedding cake.

Now it may look from the current plan that we could get this wedding through very, very
quickly. But as you can see one of the main issues is that we’re doing everything all at once right
at the start of the project. And in reality that’s not what would happen. There just wouldn’t be
enough time in a short period of time, of in this case a few weeks, to do all of those things at the
same time. And as we’ll see later on in the course there are various factors, various reasons that
will force us to spread these activities out over time. But for the moment I want to just leave the
plan like this except for adding a few dependencies that are really very important.

Now one situation that arises very often when you’re working on projects is that there are one or
two key decisions to make. And there are certain things you must do before you make those key
decisions and there are certain other things you can’t do until after you’ve made those key
decisions. And what I want to look at first in this section is the very key decision of the wedding
date, the date of the wedding itself. Now you can’t do everything before you decide on the date.
So for example we talked in the previous section about making out the guest list and sending out
the invitations. You can’t send out the invitations until you’ve set the wedding date. But you
can’t set the wedding date until you know that the venue you’re going to use is available. You
may also want to make sure that the venue you’re going to use for what we call in the UK the
reception is available as well. But you are going to have to take some things on trust. So for
example, you may have to say well I’m going to fix the wedding date and then see which
photographers are available and book one of those photographers. So what I’m going to assume
here in the wedding plan it that there are two or three key things that must happen before we can
set the wedding date. And that from that point onwards various other things will be dependent on
knowing that wedding date.

So appreciating once again that there is quite a lot of detail missing from this plan. I’ve been
through the plan and I’ve decided that the two key things that I need to do are 18, that is Book
the reception venue, and 38, that is Book the wedding venue.

So I’m going to go up to Set wedding date and rather than use the linking mechanism that I’ve
used before I’m going to type those IDs straight into the predecessors field for Set wedding date.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

So I’m going to put in 18, 38 and tick it. And that gives me a date on which I’m going to set the
wedding date. I should point out that this is not final yet because we have a few more hurdles to
overcome a little bit later on. And then from the setting the wedding date, for example, I can say
well if I select Set wedding date then certainly sending out the invitations will be dependent on
that. In reality I need a task in here that says Print the invitations but let’s just stick with Send out
invitations for now. Put in the linkage for that. And now we have a more realistic representation
of when we’re going to be in a position to send out the invitations.

Particularly in the early stages of creating a project plain it’s important to review the plan from
time to time to make sure that things haven’t been missed. I’ve left a couple of items here which
clearly have dependencies that aren’t currently represented in the plan. So for instance, task 19,
Plan and finalize seating arrangements, and that will clearly need to have the guest list finalized
before it can happen. So really a predecessor of Plan and finalize seating arrangements should be
task 14.

Now there are still one or two key dependencies that I haven’t put into the plan yet but I want to
turn my attention now to Constraints and Deadlines.

Let me insert a completely new task into this schedule. And you see that it is inserted at the
project start date. We changed that option much earlier on in the course. And if I open up that
task and go to its Advanced Tab I’ll see that the Constraint on that task is that it should Start as
soon as possible. And when scheduling from a start date and when you have the project start date
as the default date for new tasks that is the Constraint that new tasks get. Generally speaking they
should start as soon as possible.

There are a number of constraints that you can set on tasks. As late as possible. This is the
default when you are scheduling to an end date. But you can also say that a task should Finish no
earlier than a specific date, Finish no later than a specific date, it must Finish on a specific date, it
must Start on a specific date, it must Start no earlier than, or Start no later than a certain date.

Now it’s quite often external factors that mean you need to put constraints other than
straightforward ones such as soon as possible onto a task. In many cases when you’re scheduling
from a start date as we are here As soon as possible is the best bet because you’re basically
trying to get all of the tasks done as soon as possible without restricting Project to doing certain
things on certain dates. But let’s take an example of a possible Constraint.

Let’s suppose that we already know that one of the bridesmaids who is the bride’s sister is
actually out of the country. She’s working abroad at the moment and she’s not going to be
available for the Select and order bridesmaid dresses task until the beginning of March 2016. So
whatever else happens she won’t be available until then. Now if I double click on that task and
go to the Advanced Tab I can say Constraint, Start no earlier than and then I can choose a date of
March1, 2016. And when Project 2016 schedules the wedding it will take into account that
constraint that we can’t start earlier than that. Now you may want at this point to put a note in

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

here to remind yourself why you put that Constraint in. But as you can see Project 2016 has
successfully rescheduled that task to make sure that it doesn’t actually begin until the beginning
of March. Now with the plan as it is at the moment and considering that particular task the
Constraint that we’ve just added really has had quite an impact on the duration of the whole plan.

So you’ve seen there an example of a Constraint. Let’s look next at Deadlines.

Deadlines in many ways are quite similar to Constraints but there are two or three really
important differences. One difference is that a Deadline is very easily visible in the Gantt Chart.
It’s actually a physical marker in the Gantt Chart. And you get not only a marker in the Gantt
Chart but you can get warning indicators in the indicator column to the left of the table. Another
major difference is that although Constraints are used in scheduling, as you saw just now with
the limitation on the availability of one of the bridesmaids Deadlines are not actually used in
scheduling. They are used in some calculations associated with scheduling but they don’t
actually affect the schedule itself. So let’s suppose that we decided, obviously we would want the
wedding to be a success, but if possible we’d like it to before the beginning of September 2016,
partly because of the weather.

So what I’m going to do is to go down to the Wedding date task itself, the Wedding day, 41,
open that up. And I’m going to go to the Advanced Tab and I’m going to put a Deadline on it.
And the Deadline I’m going to put on it is September 1, 2016. Click on OK. Now you can’t
actually see September at the moment in the Gantt Chart on the right there so let me just zoom
out a little. And now you can see that Deadline marker, the green arrow there. If I hover over it
Deadline task, Wedding day. Deadline Thursday, September 1st. Now that’s a purely visual
marker. It won’t put a physical limitation. But clearly as we work further on the plan we need to
try to make sure that the wedding day never moves to the right of that date. We’ve got quite a lot
more to do on it yet so we don’t need to worry about it too much at the moment. And as I say if
we do start to get a problem we will see an indicator in the I column to the left of the table.

So I have two other things to do in this section, both fairly quick things to show you. First of all
I’m going to go into Options and you may recall on the Schedule page one of the options, Auto-
schedule tasks scheduled On and we changed it to Project start date which is the setting that I
usually use. But let me just change that to Current date, click on OK and insert another new task.
Now if I look at the Constraints on that new task it doesn’t have an As soon as possible
Constraint. It has a Start no earlier than Constraint of today which means as the constraint
implies that that task cannot be scheduled by Project 2016 to start earlier than that date. So that’s
an important distinction. I’m now going to Cancel that. I’m going to delete both of those new
tasks. So right click, Delete, right click, Delete. And I just change that option back to the setting I
prefer of project start date.

The second thing that I want to do here is to make quite a big change. Right near the beginning
of the plan task ID 2, Agree budget and approach. In terms of project management itself quite

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

often projects have phases. And probably the most likely phase with a wedding planning project
would be that we’d start off by saying well, “How much money are we going to need to spend on
this? What sort of level of spending are we looking at? And what will our approach be?” So for
example, are we talking about a relatively small family wedding with maybe just immediate
family, a dozen people, maybe twenty people? Or are we talking about a much grander affair
with 200 or 300 guests and maybe even more than that attending the reception and entertainment
in the evening?

Now really that particular task is a precursor to virtually everything else within the schedule.
And sometimes when you’ve been looking at a plan for a while like this one you may decide
actually I’m not 100% sure about that planning task at the beginning there because setting the
wedding date and agree budget and approach are really two completely separate tasks. So what
I’m going to do is I’m going to promote task 2, which I can do from the mini toolbar, and I’m
also going to promote Set wedding date. And I’m going to remove that planning task which now
no longer has if you like a life of its own or any function of its own. And then I’m going to make
task 1 a predecessor of each of the summary tasks. So 3, Attire, its predecessor is 1. So what I’ve
done is to go through and put task 1 as a predecessor on each of those other summary tasks. And
this reflects the fact that as you get more and more detail and accuracy in a plan you may well
want to restructure it. You may want to take everything from Attire onwards and put that inside a
sort of super summary task which would make it much easier to represent the fact that everything
in that task follows after the task with ID 1.

Something else you can do which often makes it easier to read a plan, to understand the structure
of it. If I select task 3 on the Task Tab in the Insert Group on the Task button one of the options
is Blank Row. And you can insert blank rows quite neatly into a project plan. And very often that
emphasizes the structure of the plan.

Note also, let’s take this task here with ID 1. If I insert a blank row watch what happens to all of
the predecessors in the predecessor column. That task is now task 2 and of course other task IDs
are updated accordingly. But Project 2016 takes care of all of that for you.

That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Setting Milestones

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section we’re going to look at Milestones. And Milestones are used to denote significant
points or events in a project. Usually milestone tasks have zero duration but Project 2016 does
allow milestones with non-zero durations as well.

Milestones are used for a number of different purposes. And amongst the most important ones
are as a way of providing a management snapshot of progress on a project. So there is for
example a particular report called a Milestone Report where you can just view the key
milestones in the project and get a summary of where you are in terms of those milestones which
in turn gives you a good idea of general progress on the project.

They can also be used to show you what’s coming up next, what’s happening say over the next
week or the next month or the next few days. And very often milestones are associated with a
payment schedule of some sort. So for example, when a particular point is reached in a project
there may be a payment to make.

Now what I’m going to do with the wedding project is to take some of the existing tasks and turn
them into milestones. And I may well introduce one or two new milestones as I go through.

Before I start note what I’ve done with the project at this stage. This is version 03 of the project.
I have collapsed all of the summary tasks. Note that when I do this you can’t see all of the
dependencies. So for instance, there is a dependency between a task in Wedding day and the
setting of the wedding date. But because Wedding day is collapsed you can’t see that link. If I
expand Wedding day that link is now visible Note the link from Book wedding venue, task 40,
up to Set wedding date. But when Wedding day as a summary task is collapsed you can no
longer see that link. So this just emphasizes the point that when you’re looking at a project with
some summary task collapse you need to be careful at what you’re interpreting because some
elements of the project may have become invisible even though they’re actually quite significant.

Now one very important aspect of Milestones is that generally speaking although I should say
there are exceptions, but generally speaking because a milestone is a task of zero duration it is
assumed that there is little or no work associated with the milestone itself. If I take task 4 here,
Set wedding date, if that doesn’t actually involve any significant amount of work I could make it
into a milestone. But what I’m actually going to do on this occasion is to insert specifically a
milestone which indicates when that task has been completed. So I’m going to select the task
below it which is basically a blank row and then on the Task Tab in the Insert Group I’m going
to say Insert Task. Now that task I’m going to rename to Wedding date set. So that’s basically a
statement that something has happened. It isn’t something to do itself. And then in the duration
for that task I’m going to change it to zero days which will make it into a milestone. And the
default notation, the default symbol in a Gantt Chart for a milestone is a diamond. So now I’m

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

going to select Set wedding date and select Wedding date set and link them in the usual way.
And I have my first Milestone in my project.

Now I’m also going to set milestones that indicate when the venues have been booked, the venue
for the wedding and the venue for the reception. So let’s start with the reception venue. So I want
something to indicate that task 21 has been completed. I can do the same that I did just now,
Insert Task, but there’s also an option within the Insert Group on the Task Tab of Insert
Milestone. So that automatically gives me a task of zero duration. Let’s change the name. Once
again put in the linkage and do the same down here for the wedding venue. And then I’ve just
got a very few other milestones to add. I’m going to add one to indicate that all of the attire has
been ordered, one to indicate that the guest list has been finalized and finally that the wedding is
registered and licensed.

And then I have just one more thing to do and that is that I’m going to turn the wedding date
itself into a milestone. But I don’t want to reduce its duration to zero days because there will be
things to do on the wedding day itself. So what I’m going to do is to double click on the wedding
day and I’m going to use on the Advanced Tab this little checkbox in the bottom left hand
corner, Mark task as milestone. Click on OK. The task is now marked as a Milestone. But as you
can see its duration is a day. And there will be work for people to do on that day. Let’s hope they
don’t think about it too much as work. But as far as Microsoft Project is concerned it is work.

So there we are. We have some milestones in our project. I’m going to take a look at those in just
a moment. Before we do I don’t actually need the Timeline at the moment. And the project is
beginning to take up more and more space. So let’s save a bit of space by hiding the Timeline.
Can you remember how to do that? You go to the View Tab and you can just switch off the
Timeline. So uncheck that checkbox in Split View and we now have a little bit more space to see
the project.

If you only wanted to see the milestones you can use one of the features of the View Tab which
is to use a Filter. And in the Data Group on the View Tab there is a Filter control with a
dropdown there and one of the options on the dropdown is Milestones. And if I select that I will
only see the project milestones.

And that gives you some idea of how useful milestones can be in terms of setting out the key
points in the project over the course of its duration.

Now one other point that’s clear here is that we still have a lot of work to do on this project
because for instance we still haven’t worked out when the wedding day is going to be. It’s still
right near the beginning of the project. Now you might be a little bit frustrated by this and
thinking well why don’t we sort out the wedding date? Well the reason that we don’t is that we
still have some very key factors to take into account before we can work out when the wedding
date can be. And we’re going to be moving onto those factors after we’ve done Exercise 03.
Once we’ve done those we’ll be in a better position to actually pin down a wedding day and then

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

we’ll see again how useful these milestones can be in terms of giving us a realistic summary of
the key points in the project.

Now if you have applied a filter as I have here I can un-apply it by clicking on that dropdown
again and saying No Filter.

That’s the end of this section. Exercise 03 is the next one so please join me for that.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

Video: Exercise 03

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2016.

In this section I’m going to set you Exercise 03. And as exercises go this is actually quite a long
exercise. It will take you a little while to work your way through this one. And it has a few
constituent parts.

What we’re going to do is to take the bathroom refit project and not only are we going to add the
durations of the various component tasks but we’re going to put in dependencies and we are
going to change the overall structure of the project for reasons that I’m going to explain first.

Now sometimes when you go through a project and have your first try at listing all of the tasks
and as we’ve done here grouping them together in some way you might be quite successful and
make a thorough list of what’s required in the project. But you won’t necessarily structure it in a
way that lends itself either to easy scheduling and planning or to easy understanding. And you
can finish up in a situation and this is what was happening in the wedding project that you finish
up with many, many complicated dependencies. So for instance, I have a task here, Preparation,
task 16, and one of its subtasks is Prepare for painting. Now we know that further down in the
plan we have a Paint task. And clearly one predecessor of the Paint task is going to have to be
prepare for painting. But there will also be various tasks following on from painting that depend
on it, such as actually fitting the equipment. Now whilst a number of dependencies are obviously
going to be the cornerstone of scheduling the project you can greatly simplify the structure of the
project once you’ve got your basic list of tasks by dividing the project into phases and making
each phase as self-contained as possible.

Now what we’re going to do with the bathroom refit project is to make four phases. We could do
it in three but I’m going to make it into four phases. And from the point of view of dependencies
each of the four phases is going to be self-dependent. It’s going to be independent of the others.

Now looking at what’s involved in this bathroom refit, the four phases that I think that we should
divide the project into are basically a planning, a phase of activities that happen before we start
doing the work. So the planning certainly but also arranging the finance and appointing the
contractors. All of that’s going to happen, those first three summary tasks are going to form one
phase. The second phase is going to be a purchasing phase. There’s quite a lot of selecting to do.
I need to select paint, equipment, tiles, and so on. And I need to order it and get it delivered. And
I’m going to get all of that done before the work actually starts. Now of course you could have
some of the materials arriving once work is started but for the purposes of simplicity and
planning this project I’m going to get all of the purchasing done and all of the deliveries arranged
before I actually start doing any work. The third phase will be the work itself, the
implementation itself. We’ll call that the implementation phase. And then the final phase will be

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

one where any snags are dealt with and there’s a sort of cleaning up phase, making sure that
everything is ready to be used.

Now in order to give you the information you need to do this division into four phases let’s take
a look at my answer to Exercise 03.

So there you see the four phases as collapses summary tasks. Task 2 is the planning phase
summary task. It’s total duration is 12 days. And you see the columns of information. Clearly the
values in the duration columns for the summary task will be derived from the durations of its
subtasks. But the predecessors column shows you the predecessors of summary task. And the
successors column shows you the successors of the summary task. So if you take, for example,
task ID 21, Purchasing phase. It’s predecessor, the one it depends on is task 2 which is the
Planning phase and its successor, the one that comes after it, is task 40 which is the
Implementation phase. So you can see there the very simple structure of the overall project in
those four phases.

Now if I open up one of the phases, I’ll give you an overview now of the dependencies and how
they work within the phase.

Within the Planning phase there are three summary tasks, as before, although I have moved
Finance after Contractors. And basically with these three summary tasks the individual durations
are there and lots of individual dependencies within the planning phase are there. So for instance,
Scoping, task 4, has five successors, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. And these include selecting the style,
deciding whether we’re going to have a project manager or not, checking what permissions are
required if any to do the work, fixing the dates for the works, and arranging temporary
accommodations to use while the bathroom is out of action. And then we have the summary task
Contractors where we get some contractor recommendations, make a short list, get some
quotations, appoint the contractors. Note that the Get contractor recommendations task runs in
parallel with some early phases of planning. But we won’t be getting contractor quotations until
the planning summary, task 3, is complete because we want to be clear about exactly what we’re
expecting the contractor to do. Implicit in this arrangement is the fact that we don’t believe that
any choices we make about tiles and so on will significantly affect the contractor quotation.
That’s another point to bear in mind. If the contractor says well depending on the type of floor
you get or the type of tiles you get you may increase or decrease the cost of the quotation. One
would normally have to bear that in mind.

So that’s the Contractor summary task. Then we have the Finance summary task. Once we’ve
got our contractor quotations we can set about arranging the finance.

Now in order to help you to get all of these numbers right, to get the durations in, get the
dependencies right and so on I’ve prepared a text file for each of the four phases which is in the
exercise folder and it lists the durations and the dependencies, the predecessors and successors in
terms of the task IDs in my answer to Exercise 03. If for some reason your IDs are differently

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

numbered to mine then clearly that will affect all of these predecessors and successor values. But
hopefully your ID numbers are the same as mine. So you should be able to use this to help you
not only to enter the appropriate durations but also to setup all of the correct dependencies.

So you’re looking now at the text file for the Planning phase. There is a text file for each phase
in the exercise folder.

So here’s the Purchasing phase. You may be wondering throughout why you can’t see start and
finish dates here in my answer to Exercise 03. Well whenever you’re working your way through
Exercise 03 it won’t be on the same dates that I’m recording this. So to a large extent the dates, if
I gave you my dates wouldn’t really help you. The durations are important, the dependencies are
important but I’m assuming throughout that your dates will be different from mine. But I’ve got
a little twist in the tail of that towards the end of this section on Exercise 03.

Okay so that’s the Purchasing phase. Pretty straightforward. It includes the delivery of each of
the materials, tiles and so on. So at the end of this I’ve introduced a milestone there, task 38, All
materials on site as a significant milestone in the project.

Next we have the Implementation phase. Let me explain the main points here.

We set up a skip, a receptacle for the waste products which arise from gutting the existing
bathroom and from the building work that we’re going to do in fitting the new bathroom. Then
we have a lot of preparation to do. Prepare for tiling, prepare for flooring. So there may be joist
work to do. There may be plastering to do, etcetera. And we do the first fix electrics and the first
fix plumbing. These are the electrics that go over the ceiling, behind the walls, under the floor.
Similarly the plumbing that you can’t see. The waste pipes and so on. Then we do the painting,
the flooring, the tiling, any other wall work that’s needed, general building work there such as
55, 57, 59. Then we start the second fix electrics. This is things like putting the sockets on the
walls. And the second fix plumbing which will be things like the pipes from the pipework behind
the walls, but this is the visible pipework that connects up to the taps, the faucets. It’s often the
case nowadays that there is some kind of electrical certification needed once the electrical work
is finished. So that’s task 50 here. And then once the second fix is underway fitting the
equipment begins, task 61. And when the fitting of the equipment is finished we have a
milestone, task 62.

The final phase, the Completion phase, is simplicity itself. We have a task to resolve any
outstanding snags, we clean up and we declare the refit complete.

There is one last part to Exercise 03. And the last part is to move the start date of the project to
the first working day of the month following your current month. Clearly your dates will be
different to my dates. I’m doing this in late December 2015. So I’m going to move the start of
this project to January 4, 2016 which is the first working day for me in that year. When we
looked at the Project Information dialogue earlier on in the course you saw a way of changing a

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

project start date. But once you’ve got a project setup and you have constraints and deadlines
setup the way that you would change the start date of a project so that the constraints and
deadlines are moved in line with any change you’re making is to use the Move Project option
which is in the Schedule Group on the Project Tab. You choose your new start date. In this case
I’m going to choose January 4, 2016. Make sure that Move Deadlines is checked. That will move
the deadlines and constraint dates. Click on OK and my project is now moved to start on January
4, 2016.

So that’s the last part of the exercise for you. That’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the
next one.

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Microsoft Project 2016 for Beginners

e you again online sometime soon. My name’s Toby. That’s it. Bye for now.

© Copyright 2008-2016 Simon Sez IT, LLC. All Rights Reserved.