Video: Showing, Hiding and Moving Subtasks
Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section we’re going to
look in a little bit more detail at how to work with a project outline. In order to demonstrate this, I’ve made a copy of the latest version of our building project and I’ve collapsed all of the tasks down.
So first of all, on the View tab in the Data Group there’s a button there on the left, Outline. If you click on the drop down next to the word Outline, you have a number of options one of which is All subtasks. If I select that option, All subtasks, I see all the subtasks in the project. As you can see all of those summary tasks are fully expanded. I can see the whole project. At the moment, I’ve also got the critical task switch set so I can see which ones are the critical tasks. Similarly, if I go back to that same button and say Hide subtasks, then all of the subtasks are hidden right up to the level of the Project summary task.
So let me go back to that drop down again and this time instead of saying Show subtasks, I’m going to say Level 1. Now Level 1 gives me the first level of tasks in this project outline. If I say Level 2 watch what happens. Level 2 takes me to the next level. Now that’s not quite seeing all of the subtasks because as you should remember we also have a further level down here under fit windows and doors. Fit doors and fit windows, each of those is a summary task as well. So if I go to Level 3, I see those as well. Now, of course, in a long very complex project you may have many levels of subtask. But this is a really useful way of being able to control what level of subtask you can see at any time.
Now let me go back to Level 1 again. You don’t have to work on the whole of the project when you’re controlling these levels. If I, for instance, just selected lay foundation, as we’ve seen already I could click on the little wedge there in order to expand lay foundation. But I can also, say, using that drop down, Show subtasks, and in this case because I have a specific summary task selected it just shows the subtasks for the selected summary task. One way of thinking of that is that before we really had the Project summary task selected and therefore were dealing with all the tasks in the project. So in this case I have two summary tasks expanded, lay foundation and build walls. If I select one of them, just say build walls, click on Outline, and
then at the top there say Hide subtasks, it only hides the subtasks of the selected summary task not of all summary tasks in the project.
So that’s how to view the project outline. If you want to move tasks around, there are a couple of things to be aware of. In a very straightforward case, let’s take this task here, base brick work. If I just want to put this into a different position, if I go to the Task tab, there’s the normal cut, copy, and paste buttons there or I can use keyboard shortcuts. I’m going to use a keyboard shortcut here of Control-X. Watch what happens by the way to the dependencies. If I take base brick work and I cut it and let’s say I go right down to the bottom, Select building complete and paste it down there. It becomes an independent task but notice that the dependencies still apply. Note how the arrows have changed but basically same dependency and, of course, the task itself will still have the same start and finish dates because I haven’t changed anything that would affect how it’s scheduled. All I’ve done is draw it in a different position within the outline. If I drag it, select, and then drag it up and drop it somewhere, maybe in the same position it was or near the position it was already, notice I’ve got it in between two of the subtasks of lay foundation and I release it then it does assume the indent level of those tasks, and that’s another important thing to bear in mind.
So that was moving a subtask within a summary task. Let’s go up and look at the prepare site task. That’s a summary task with four subtasks. If I take the prepare site task which is a summary task, select and drag that down to the bottom, watch what happens. The summary task and all of its subtasks get moved as well. Now, again, it doesn’t affect my schedule in any way. It only affects where they’re positioned within the Gantt Chart. But if you move a summary task, if you cut, copy, drag a summary task, then all of its subtasks move with it. If I wanted to move one of the individual subtasks, maybe make it part of a different summary task or make it a standalone task, I’ve got to select the individual task and work on the individual task.
Now let me just demonstrate that this works in pretty much the same way if you’re using touch. Let’s go into touch mode and let’s suppose that I wanted to move the site inspection summary task. The first thing to do is to select it. So all I need to do is to tap to select it. Note the two little circular selection handles, one above and one below the selected task. Now to cut it, I can either go to the Ribbon or if I tap and hold on the task, bring up the mini toolbar. One of the options on there is cut. Note I get a warning there about cutting and possibly deleting a summary
task there, but that’s fine. I know what I’m doing. Click on OK. Now if I select the task above which I want to paste this, so if I select the first task, prepare site. Now this time I’ll use the Ribbon. So let’s go to the Task tab on the Ribbon and tap on paste; that pastes the site inspection summary task there and I can either just tap to expand. Or if I go back to the View tab again and use the Outline button with Show subtasks, you can see that the site inspection summary task is now expanded. So as I say it works pretty much the same if you’re using touch.
That’s how to work with the Project Outline and that’s the end of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.