Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In this section, we’re going to start to look
at views. We’ve already seen a couple of different views of the project that we’re working on. In this section, we’re going to look at some more and we’re also going to start to look at how to choose the best view to suit the particular task that you’re performing at the time.
Now one thing that’s a common feature of most but not all of the views in Project 2013 is this vertical dividing line here. This currently separates the table on the left. We’re going to look at these tables in great detail later on in the course. From the Gantt Chart in this case on the right and as we’ve seen, you can change the position of that dividing line either if you’re using the mouse hover over the line until you see the cursor change into a double vertical line with an arrow sticking out either side, then just click and hold with the left mouse button and you can move the line backwards and forwards. Or if you’re using touch, all you need to do is to touch on the line. You’ll see a little round selector appear and then you can drag to the left or right with your finger to change the position of the vertical line. So I just do that now. So you can see it’s straightforward whether you’re using the mouse or touch to change the position of that vertical dividing line.
Now we’re looking at the View tab on the Ribbon now and we’ve currently got Gantt Chart shown. In the group at the left hand end of the Ribbon, we have Task Views and this is really a straightforward way of accessing all of the available task views. Some of those task views have specific buttons. So for instance, the command button in the top right hand corner of the group if I hover over it that gives us access to the network diagram. Below that the calendar and below that a task form. Now I’m going to come back to one or two of those later on. I want to concentrate now though on not Gantt Chart but Task Usage. Let’s click on task usage.
Now with task usage we have a list of the tasks. We’ve just got five tasks in our building project at the moment. And in the Task Usage View you can see that we have a list of the resources that are used in each task. So if we look at the build walls task, we can see the resources are brick layer and bricks. And one of the great things about the Task Usage View is that it will actually show us over a period of time how we are using the resources that we’re using on a specific task.
Now the brick layer we are using 80 hours of and the bricks we are using 12 thousands of. But what we can see in the Task Usage View is when we are using them. This can be useful for many reasons, not least of which we know when we need the brick layer to be available for example and we need to know when we need the bricks for. We maybe don’t want all of the bricks delivered right at the start of the building project. They might be in the way when we’re preparing the site. It’d be much better to get the bricks delivered just before we need them. Now in the right hand half of the view, we actually have a display that shows us a break down of when we’re using the resources. Now at the moment, we don’t appear to be using them at any time but that’s because the timescale we’ve got is a day by day timescale. And as you can see in the particular week, we’re looking at which is the week that I’m recording this in we’re not actually using any of these resources. If I scroll a little bit earlier in time, still no sign of using those resources. Scroll a bit later in time and eventually we come to the point where we’re using those resources. And as you can see the bricks on each day, starting roughly the middle of April, we’re going to need 1.2 thousands of bricks each day to build the walls. And we’re going to need eight hours of the brick layers time in order to build the walls. So this is a really useful breakdown of what we need and when we need it, but as you can see the current view is not really ideal because it was quite difficult to track what we wanted in this Task Usage View. So let’s look at a couple of ways that we can make a view like this more useful and so that we can see more in view at any one time and one of the more obvious ways, of course, is to move that divider. So we give ourselves a little bit more space on the right. But in the case of a building project which is going to go on for many weeks getting a broad view using a day by day display is maybe not the best option. There are a couple of ways of getting round this. One of them is if you look at the Zoom Group on the View tab, the top right hand corner there’s this little magnifier, click on the drop down, and go into Zoom, Zoom dialog. With the Zoom dialog you are given options of how much to show in view. Now what you can show in view, you can have one week, two weeks, one month, three months, the duration of a selected task. So I could actually choose a view which would setup on the right hand side there the timescale to cover just the duration of a selected task. Or, and this is the option I’m going to use here, I can say Show me the entire project. Now if I click on Entire project and click on OK, I get the whole project in view. Now, of course, in this particular case that doesn’t really give me a good break down
either because with this view, all I find is that in one period of time I need 9.6 thousands and in another period of time I need 2.4 thousands, and the periods of time are a little bit strange actually. If you look at the top, the timescale at the top there I’ve got March 17th, April 14th, May 12th, and I’ve got Monday, Friday, presumably Tuesday, Sunday. It all seems a little bit strange. What Project 2013 does when you select entire project is it sets up the timescale literally to show the entire project. And although sometimes that’s really useful on other occasions, it gives you a very strange timescale. But we can actually select the timescale on the right there in a much more flexible and adaptable way and that’s what we’re going to look at next.
So let’s go in and control this timescale a lot more accurately and conveniently. If you right click where the timescale is there, so somewhere around those dates or the days of the week markers there you will see timescale, dot, dot, dot. Click on Timescale, dot, dot, dot on the contextual menu and you get the Timescale dialog. Now the Timescale dialog has a number of tabs, including three tabs for the possible three tiers of the time table: top tier, middle tier, bottom tier. And literally they are top tier, middle tier, bottom tier. At the moment, you can only see two tiers. And if you look at Timescale Options within the dialog, you can see that it says Show two tiers, only middle and bottom are in use. There’s a drop down here whereby you can show one tier, two tiers, or three tiers. We’re going to stick with two tiers.
So let’s have a look at the middle tier. The middle tier currently says Middle tier formatting, units weeks, count four. The interval on the middle tier is four weeks which is why you’ve got those strange dates: March the 17th, April 14th. That’s actually a four week period rather than a calendar month period. And four weeks after April 14th is May 12th, so that explains those rather strange dates up there. The labeling of the time period is dictated by this field, Label, and you have a choice of ways of labeling dates. There’s a whole long, long list of options there which you can experiment with and you can decide here how you want those labels aligned with the time periods. So in this case that label, so for instance March 17, 2013 is aligned in the left of the time period that it covers. Now let’s look at the bottom tier.
So, click on bottom tier and the bottom tier is arranged in multiples of 11 days. Now that really is a rather strange interval to use but it is a result of deciding to show the whole project duration in view. Let’s change that to a period of say one week. So I’m going to change that down to one
and I’m going to make that weeks. You get a preview of what the interval’s going to look like here. So let’s just click on OK and see how that looks in real life. And that’s not actually so bad now. We’ve got a little bit more useful division of the use of the labor. So we’ve got brick layer, 24 hours that week, 40 hours that week, 16 hours that week, and then we’ve got an idea of how many bricks we need per week for the period of three weeks that spanned by this particular task. Now, of course, there’s absolutely nothing to stop me going back into that Timescale dialog again, go into the bottom tier again, and I could if I wanted to change from one week to one day, click on OK, and now I really do get a break down day by day of what’s needed.
And then let me just go back into the timescale once more. There is also a button to the right of the Show Option in Timescale Options that basically let’s me rescale what I’ve got there anyway. Now at the moment, the figure of 104 is a percentage and I’ve got this display set at 104%. If I wanted to reduce it, I could say put it down to 80%. You can actually type a value in there. You don’t have to use the little rollers. Let’s suppose I said 80%. I’d make each of the columns in the display a little bit narrower and I get a little bit more in view.
Now I hope you can see from that that when it comes to formatting the timescale that’s shown, in fact in just about any view in Project 2013, there’s a lot of power and flexibility in what you can do. And you can usually get a timescale format set that enables you to see just what you want to see in any given situation.
So I’ve demonstrated here the formatting of the timescale using Task Usage View. The approach in Gantt Chart View is exactly the same. If I click back now and go back into the Gantt Chart, then I could customize the Gantt Chart timescale in exactly the same way and to achieve exactly what affect that I want at any given time.
So we’ve looked at a couple of the main Task Views here. In the next section we’re going to look at some of the Resource Views and we’re also going to look at Split View so please join me for that.
Video: Resource View and Split View
Toby: Welcome back to our course on Project 2013. In the previous section we looked at
views, in particular we looked at a couple of Task Views and at how to format the time scale in any view that includes a time scale to make it suit the purposes of the view that you are using. In this section we’re going to look at Resource Views, first of all, and then we’re going to look at Split View.
So first of all let’s look at the resource sheet that we’ve used already. In the Resource Views Group on the View tab there is a button, Resource Sheet. Click on Resource Sheet and we see the resource sheet itself where we can enter details of new resources or maintain the details of the resources we’ve already got. And as you saw before, if we double click on one of these, we bring up the Resource Information dialog.
Now the other very useful view here is Resource Usage, and if you bear in mind what task usage showed us let’s just take a look at resource usage.
Now note once again it’s a Split View vertically, but on the left this time instead of a list of tasks and then for each task the resources that are used we have a list of resources, and for each resource a list of the tasks that that resource works on or is used on. So for instance, the brick layer works on the build walls task, the bricks are used in the build walls task and so on. Now as before, we can customize the time scale on the right in order to see what our resource requirements are. But as I say basically this is Task Usage View turned inside out if you like. So it’s arranged by resource and then within resource, we can see how each resource is used, the tasks that it’s used in as opposed to the other way around we had in Task Usage View. So that’s resource usage.
Now I should point out that pretty much on any of these drop downs, for instance here on the resource usage drop down here, if I click on that drop down, I almost always see More Views at the bottom. Click on More Views and you have a list of pretty much all of the available views and there are quite a few of them. Also either starting from the drop down or from this More Views dialog, you can make a copy of a particular view. You could, for instance, make a copy of Gantt Chart View and then you could customize it to your specific requirements. Now customization of these views is outside the scope of this course but if you find that you like a
particular view and that you like a particular set of settings where you have a combination of what you can see, the time scale, and so on, then you can setup a custom view with a name of your choice. So that’s a good thing to find out about if you think you have a need for creating custom views later on.
So we’ve looked at the resource sheet and we’ve looked at Resource Usage View. There’s another very useful resource view which will become more useful later on when we start looking at overallocation of resources when we get to a situation where we’ve got a certain amount of resource to use on a project and it just isn’t enough. We get to a situation where we need more people or more materials or we need another room or something like that, and there just isn’t enough to go round. Now the view that can be very helpful in that situation is Resource Graph View.
Now I’m just going to click on the resource sheet drop down here and one of the options at the bottom there, More Views, let’s choose resource graph, click on Apply. This is another view with a time scale on the right but it doesn’t have a table as such on the left. What it has is a sequence of little panels and each panel corresponds to one of our resources. At the moment, the first resource shown is brick layer and there is a graph showing the use of our one brick layer. Don’t forget 100%, that’s one brick layer. And for a period, this is a period of roughly three weeks, just under, then our brick layer is 100% allocated. So we’re going to keep that brick layer solidly busy on our project for a period of time spanning three weeks. Now at the bottom of that pane on the left there’s a scroll bar, and if you click on the arrow at one end of the scroll bar, it actually takes you through the resources in your project. So I’m going to click right first, bricks is the next resource, allocated, overallocated, only allocated. All the time you’ve blue here you haven’t got an overallocation problem. Let’s try the next one. Carpenter. Again, that’s fine.
Now if you’re doing this on a project of yours and you’ve got the same problem, you normally have which is fitting everything into view, don’t forget you can always flip into view where you see the entire project. And in fact in the Zoom Group on the View tab, the second button down on the right there is a straightforward zoom entire project button. So if you click on that it’ll always give you the entire project. Now, of course, you may get those strange time periods that we saw earlier on. But if all you want to do is to try to spot any red overallocations using
resource graph, then this is certainly good enough because you’ll see any red that there is by stepping through your resources in this view. So that’s Resource Graph View and we’ll be using that a little bit more later on in the course.
So now I’m going to go back to Gantt Chart View and I’m going to talk about Split View. There is a Split View Group on the View tab on the Ribbon and it’s got a couple of checkboxes. The timeline checkbox we’ve already seen. You can use that to switch on and switch off the timeline. We’re going to come back and look at the timeline in little bit more detail later on. But it’s really the second box that we’re interested in here. That’s the details box because that’s the