There are no must haves to the course you're embarking upon. To begin learning how to begin a project in Microsoft Project, this educational lesson, as well as those that follow, are written assuming the reader don't need to have any prior experience with any project management program. For that matter, you simply wish to know two things to start developing your first project using Microsoft Project application: Microsoft Project Logo The guide is written in such a way that it would not matter even if you have Microsoft Office Project 2013, 2007, or Microsoft Project 2003, or any earlier version up to Project 98 installed to your desktop. The limitations of the older versions, if any, and the new qualities of the newer types could be dealt with, as necessary and suitable to the tutorial.

For this MS Projects educational, I will come up with a concept of a sample task and its actions, with which we will learn the steps required to create a assignment. You can and it is recommended that you simply do check out the entire steps you learn here in your own task after finishing each lesson. When you're comprehensive with this lesson, make sure to have a look at some of any other Microsoft Project tutorials available at Bright Hub. Ready to begin. Here we go…For the sample project, assume you are the Project Manager with an event management firm, and the 1st simple assignment entails getting ready a musical live performance at one of the local auditoriums. The major activities involved, as that you would be able to observe, will be fixing an appropriate date with the artist, opting for and finalizing terms with one of the local auditoriums, coordinating with the media and inserting advertisements for the event, getting tickets published and selling tickets.

Besides these tasks, you also can want to tackle the administrative tasks of organizing hotel accommodation and delivery for the artist’s troupe. How can you plan some of these actions on a calendar, using Microsoft Project?Here are the steps: Open the Microsoft Project application to your desktop In most cases, you could have the appliance icon in your machine, which you can double click to start the application. In case that you would be able to see a blue Guide pane to the left of the “Gantt Chart” divider, as shown in the head figure above, please close this blue pane by clicking on the X at the head right of the blue pane. That way you are going to increase the visible workspace for entering data in our sample project. Once the Guide pane is closed, your screen will appear as shown in the figure above, with only two panes the Task pane and the Calendar pane to its right.

Enter Tasks and Duration Now that you can start getting into the data in the Task pane for our sample project. For the moment, ignore the 1st column in the Task pane, and enter the data only under Task Name and Duration columns. The tasks and the intervals you are looking to enter are as follows the default unit for length is “days,” and hence you just are looking to enter the numeric part:As you enter the duty length, which you can see a Blue bar performing on the proper, graphically indicating the length. This is the task bar, and the collection of those bars is named the Gantt chart. We will worry about this later. For now, keep coming into the further tasks:After you have entered all of the above tasks and intervals, your screen should look like the screen shot above.

Concert Zero, to point out here is the Zero th edition of your assignment. All Microsoft Project files are saved, by default, with an extension “. mpp”, and we will use the default extension. Great. If you have got gone this far without any hitch, you're almost there. You are, in fact, puzzling over why the entire actions are starting on an analogous date, right?By you could try these out , Microsoft Project will assume the Project and all actions start on the existing date.

As a Project Manager, let us say you're tied up till the tip of August, and hence you'll like to devote time to this task only from September 1. For doing this, click on “Project” on the Top menu bar and click on on “Project Information” from the selections in the drop down list. The Project Information window should pop up as shown here. For now, ignore all other fields on this window, and consider only the first field “Start Date”. Change this to September 1 and click on on “OK”.

Immediately you're going to notice this window closes, and all of the Gantt bars in your assignment have moved to a start date of September 1. I know you're curious to know what any other fields on the Project Information window mean; we shall come again to this topic in a later lesson. Now let’s move to the question of how to offer instructions to Microsoft Project that our actions want to follow some logical series. This is completed through the use of “Task dependencies” or “Precedence relationships”. There are a number of ways wherein this dependency guideline can accept. For this lesson let us do it by simply “linking” the tasks graphically.

First off, we all know that the second one task “Finalize Artist and function date” can start only after the first task “Call up Artists” finishes. To point out this: 1 On the Gantt chart. place the mouse on the middle of the task bar akin to the first task, until the mouse cursor becomes a 4 way arrow. 2 Hold down the left mouse button and drag the mouse pointer over the second one task Finalize artist. which is to be linked.

after which liberate the mouse button. You will notice a link line from the finish of the 1st task to the beginning of the second task. 3 Repeat the above steps for linking task 2 with task 3, then task 3 with task 4, task 4 with task 5, and task 5 with task 6 since they all follow an analogous sequential precedence dating between them. The priority relationship among task 5 and task 6 may be arguable, but for this project let us assume we want to be certain about availability of an auditorium before we book slots for advertisements, and hence that this is a reasonable relationship for now. We will go into other chances in later courses. 4 Task 7 Print tickets, as which you could see, needn't wait till of entirety of task 6, but can start as soon as the auditorium is confirmed.

Hence, you are going to link task 7 with task 5. Task 8 Sell tickets will follow task 7. 5 Tasks 9 and 10, that are administrative tasks, can logically be taken up as soon as the date with the artist is proven, and hence both of these can be described as tasks instantly following task 2. Now you've got accomplished all task dependencies, area to the assumptions we now have made. Your Project should appear as shown above. Some of the reports that you may try are given above.

Do keep operating together with your file follow, obviously, makes you best. If you've got any questions, please fill them out in the comments section below this text, and we will tackle them soon. This series of articles take you throughout the steps involved in constructing an entire assignment using Microsoft Project program. The series starts with a very simple task spanning just ten tasks, and the builds on the straightforward task by introducing new facets.