HERE YOU ARE, in the final stages of the planning phase, and your schedule is longer than you anticipated. Or your schedule seems to be fitting into the time allotted for your project, but you’re just not sure that you’ve set everything up correctly. This chapter helps you evaluate the factors that affect the timing of the tasks in your project.
When you begin to evaluate the timing of your project, you should look at a couple of different views in Microsoft Office project 2007 to help you get a handle on project timing. At the same time, you might want to take a look at what tasks are driving other tasks.
In 4, I covered views in general; let’s take a quick look at some of the views that can help you focus on tasks. First is the Gantt Chart view, shown in 5-1. From this view, the table, with its outline organization, helps you identify the general organization of your project by displaying parent tasks in bold print and indenting subtasks. The table also contains other information about the tasks, and since you can change tables, you can view a wide variety of information. The chart portion of the view presents a visual representation of a task’s duration, and the link lines help you identify what tasks depend on other tasks.
The Calendar view, shown in 5-2, can help you visualize a project’s duration in a familiar environment. Using the buttons above the view, you can focus on a particular week’s tasks or a particular month’s tasks, or you can set up a custom date range to view.
Figure 5-2. The Calendar view provides a familiar environment to help you get a handle on the duration of a project.
As you proceed through this chapter, you’ll find some other views that help you in specific situations when working with tasks in your schedule.