welcome to this introduction to Microsoft Project this is the first in a series of short videos to help you be able to use Microsoft Project to manage your projects if you've opened Microsoft Project you will see that you're into this sort of opening screen where you may see different templates and different different options for you to choose if you're just starting out to use Microsoft Project your best bet is just open a blank project file which would be just this blank project template which is the starting point for most projects so you just double click on that and your screen should appear and you should see a what looks like something a screen similar to maybe Excel where you see a series of rows and columns and column headings along the top and then your typical software programs where you'll see a series of menus by the way if you want to see the the pull downs to the various menus and you want to have them sort of pinned up there you can just click on the pin and then they should stay down whenever you click on a different tab along the top so from left to right we have file the file tab which is your typical where you want to save of your files and you want to print them when you want to set up certain options in your program very typical to most software programs then across the rest you'll see a series of tabs like tasks resource report project view team format these tabs are really specific to what you want to do in Microsoft Project if it's something you want to do to an activity or a task lightly likely it would be under the tasks tab if it's that you want to add resources to hold accountabilities to various activities then under the resource tab is a very likely location where you would go if you've entered a lot of data in Microsoft Project one of the good things about planning and scheduling with project management software if you enter the data there's an endless amount of reports and data that you can pull together you can filter you can customize and under the report tab you're able to do that under the project tab it really is if you are doing something globally to the project so it's where we can put in special information about calendars it's where we can puts project start date information in it's where we later will talk about in another recording set of baseline where you want to update the project so it's really about things that have to do with the whole project under that top view is how do I want to view the information how do I want to organize it your there's a whole bunch of filters and highlights and groupings that we can perform we can adjust how we view the information on the Gantt chart which it appears over in this area you know whether we want to show it by days hours weeks how we want to scale it up and then there's different information too regarding how we want to display the network diagram which screen we want to be looking at the Gantt chart tracking again a lot of different choices in here the team tab if you're working in teams you can utilize this function generally this will be outside the scope of what we're doing but it is there if there's collaboration going on under the format tab this is how you want it to look like you can display it in different colors you can display the critical activities so you can have them displayed and shown or not shown so if that's checked it'll show the critical activities in red typically or you can also format different colors for different bar types you can use some of the drawing tools that you usually see in most Microsoft Office programs which can come in very handy in more advanced features where we want to sort of outline delays and what's going on in the project we can do the little drawings on top of the Gantt chart just to explain things if we want and then we can take snapshots so there's a lot of different functions that can go on under these various tabs the ones that you'll most likely be starting out with would be the tasks tab when you're initially setting up a project and the project tab where you want might want to put in the project start date for example project information if you want to put in when you want this project to start you would put it in here so you just pull this down and you select what date you want this project to actually start on so if I wanted it to start on let's say I wanted to start on September 15 2020 if I click there and I click OK then that will be when I enter information it will put that down so for example if I said that I was going to do a I don't know a bathroom renovation type that in press ENTER and you notice that when I do that a little thumbtack comes up and you also notice that this these are remaining blank for now so I'm just gonna pull this much like you would in Excel if a column is too small you can just pull it to shape it and but this what this tab is referring to this is what we call manual schedule so it means this activity is manually scheduled what I would like for the activity to be is Auto scheduled and I'm gonna click on that and you'll see it puts in the date for for most purposes you'll want your activities to be put into auto schedule if you have an older version of Microsoft Project going back to 2007 they didn't even have a manual or auto schedule it was all auto scheduled manual schedule is is okay if you want to just put in a series of activities and you don't want them to do anything for now and maybe later you want to enact them so you want kind of dormant there you could have it under manual schedule but otherwise I would advise that you have everything under auto schedule now kind of drive you nuts if you don't change the program so that it's doing all the activities that you enter in auto schedule for example I've got bathroom renovation here and let's say I had demolish demolish existing bathroom and I press ENTER it's back to manual schedule and so then I would have to go in and I would have to go auto schedule well a much better thing to do would be to go down to the bottom left of your screen click on where it says manual schedule click auto schedule and now what it will do is any new activities that I now put in so demolish existing bathroom so let's say stud walls I press ENTER and now it's on auto schedule and you notice it puts it at September 15th 2020 that's because I put in under the project start date and project information I put that as my start date if I didn't do that it would be putting in today's date as the start date it would assume today as the starting date now of course if I did leave it at today's date as the start date I could always later go in and put when I wanted the project to start and it would move everything to the project start date which is fine too so you have the ability to change things as you go along you're not necessarily stuck at one point so for entering tasks we just enter the pass and generally speaking you know I've got demolished existing bathrooms stud stud walls maybe I could have rough-in plumbing rough-in electrical and HVAC has a series of activities notice when I press ENTER it puts one day and it puts a question mark the question mark is telling you hey you didn't actually give me a duration so it's like a warning it's a flag to say hey you didn't give me a duration what do you want otherwise it just by default puts in one day now you notice I could I could just enter a series of let's say task 1 task to task 3 tasks for task 5 now if I put 5 and I press ENTER it'll put 5 days by default if I put 5 d it'll put 5 days if I put 5 H it'll put 5 hours I put 5 M it'll put 5 minutes if I put 5 mo it'll put 5 months and so on right so you can pretty much get the idea of how this plays out it basically whatever the first letter is that you put it will utilize that so 5 and again I could put another one here I could put 5w for five weeks the other thing is there you notice that it's five days today is showing as our sorry september 15th is showing as a Tuesday and so the five days is actually crossing the weekend so we can sort of see there that it's crossing the Saturday and Sunday so it's not counting Saturday and Sunday that's because the days our work days they're not calendar days their work days so we have five days in place and it covers that amount now let's say I put let's say it was concrete and I had concrete curing well you know what concrete cures over a weekend as well so in a case like that I might want to put 5e D and then if I put 5 e D it's going to count Saturday so you got Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday it will count that the e stands for a lop stays it'll go through non-working time by default the calendar is showing non-working time as Saturday and Sunday in another video we'll talk about how you can change and adjust the calendar to suit your purposes the default is typically a 40-hour week working 8 hours a day Monday to Friday and not working Saturday and Sunday of course we can make this program work whenever we want so we have full flexibility on however we want to set it up so that's sort of just giving you an idea of how that structured now as we're basically setting up activities one of the ways that we link activities together and I'm just gonna maybe get rid of these activities that I've listed here so what I would suggest if you want to get rid of a series of activities you just highlight them and then you just press the delete button and they will disappear so going back up to the top here let's let's do a couple of things here if we want to create a work breakdown structure we can just highlight these activities and that will I like them for anything that we want to do to them we can go up to the task tab click on the task tab and click on the indent so now we have these activities are indented under the heading of bathroom renovation so demolish existing bathroom and we're gonna say that that's going to take two days and we're gonna say stud walls we're gonna say that that's gonna take one day and we're gonna say ruff and plumbing is gonna take two days ruff and electrical we'll say three and roughen hvac will say one day okay so we're just giving some duration for these activities the next thing we want to figure out is how do we want to sequence the work so to put in the sequencing we utilize this column called predecessors and in the predecessor column we say what must happen before something else so before we do the stud walls we're saying we want to strip out the bathroom and before we ruff in the plumbing we say we want to have the stud walls done and we could basically say ruff in electrical would be after roughing plumbing and rough-in hvac so we could go for and then we could go five it puts one after the other the other way we could have done that is we could if I delete these for now we could just highlight all of these in a row from top to bottom and sequin how you sequence it is important so from top to bottom and then basically then what we could do is we could link these activities up here with the link icon so you just click on the link icon now of course I would have to be under the tasks tab and you'll see it looks like a chain link and we click on that now link them if you ever decide you don't want something linked you could either delete it over here or you could click here and it will unlink them so that's the link this is time link so that puts them in order of how we want this to go we could also have let's say building system inspections maybe I allow three days here and then what I could say is I'm going to I for the buildings system inspections let's change that to inspections I'm gonna have here I'm gonna say building system inspections approved I'm gonna widen this column a little bit I can get that all in there and I'm gonna put four building systems inspections that I want to have four done I want to have five done and I want to have six done and so you notice that when I did that it places link arrows as successors to these activities or predecessors to building systems inspections so now those activities are linked that way now really doesn't make sense for me to to sort of link these here and then link that there if I was gonna do it in this sequence so to be honest if I was going to avoid double linking things I could just have this say predecessor right so predecessor number six and so that would be much more clean in this example because it because really what I've said is this has to be done before I start doubt that has to be done before I start that and this has to be done before I start that so it kind of follows that process whereas before I had them this has to be done that has to be done and then these all have to be done but I really had said it when I had these linked one after the other so the next thing I want to do here is maybe maybe that's not the way I want this to go let's assume it's a real big bathroom okay so it's a really big bathroom and let's get rid of the links that are here here here and let's change this a little bit and let's have we got rough and plumbing and let's say that once we have the stud walls done we're gonna rough in the electrical we're gonna rough in the HVAC all at the same time in that case then it would require that I would have building system inspections that ruff and plumbing has to be done ruff and electrical has to be done ruff in HVAC has to be done before I do those that would be very important to do that that way so they would all be linked one after the other and then I would have building systems inspections approved I would just put number seven and because building systems improved is really the completion of something it's not the doing of something I would put a zero duration there and you notice it makes it a diamond shape what that's doing is it's making it a milestone so that now means that building systems inspection approved is a milestone it's a point in time and not when you give something zero duration of Microsoft Project that's what it will do to it so we based we've just entered these activities one after the other and we have them in sync that they're all starting after stud walls to be honest in a bathroom that would be too much going on in one room but I just wanted to show you the process of how you can have things start at the same time and then how they can complete so we have the milestone date is at September 25th and that's all structured what I don't see here is the critical path I'd like to see the critical path so if I go to the format tab sorry the View tab actually the format tab and you see where it says critical tasks I click that it will show the critical path red so the critical path is displayed in red that means that's the longest path to complete the project and it's very important that everything is linked every predecessor every activity should have a predecessor next successor except the first activity won't have a predecessor and the last activity won't have a successor so that's important to also understand that we want to have a complete network everything linked to each other we don't do that then it can be problematic so I'll just give you a quick look at that if that happens I'm gonna get rid of the number 5 here and let's see what that looks like do you see how it changed what's critical this activity here is not linked so it's just sort of idling there and if rough and electrical took longer it wouldn't show exactly what's necessarily going on the project right so it's it's not showing the impact it has on other activities which would not be a good thing so we have to be careful that we always complete the network and that all the activities are linked in their proper order so I'm gonna go here I'm gonna go 4 comma 5 comma 6 and then we've got them all back and linked up and this way if this takes longer you'll see that it will move those activities out change the dates on those succeeding activities which is very very important if the scheduling software and using the critical path method is to work properly we could of course then save our file and then we will have completed this quick introduction of how you start up a project file will please join me for more Microsoft Project use videos on my youtube channel thanks for watching