How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into eight parts. Although the first seven parts are written for those who use the Standard edition, all of the features and procedures documented in those chapters also apply to those who use the Professional edition. Part VIII contains chapters that show how to use the additional features that you get with the Professional edition. Following is a brief review of these parts and the chapters you'll find in each part.

Part I, "Getting Started with Microsoft Project 2003"

Part I introduces you to Microsoft Project 2003 and shows you how to set up and manage project documents.

Chapter 1, "The Power of Microsoft Project 2003," introduces you to project management concepts and the major phases of managing a project.

Chapter 2, "Learning the Basics of Microsoft Project," introduces you to the Microsoft Project workspace. With few exceptions, this workspace is the same for both Standard and Professional editions. In this chapter, you'll learn to navigate the screen display, scroll and select data, and select different views of a project.

Chapter 3, "Setting Up a Project Document," reviews the preliminary steps you take when creating a project. You'll learn how to specify the calendar of working days and hours, how to enter basic information about the project, and how to specify the planned date for starting or finishing the project. You'll also learn how to adjust the most critical of the default values that govern how Microsoft Project displays and calculates a project.

Chapter 4, "Managing Project Files," presents the information you need to work with project files. Included is a comprehensive discussion of the Global template file and how you use it.

Part II, "Scheduling Tasks "

Part II shows how to build and organize the list of tasks that make up the project plan.

Chapter 5, "Creating a Task List," explains how you define and enter the tasks, milestones, and recurring tasks that must be completed to successfully finish a project. You'll also learn how to organize the task list in outline form, in accordance with top-down planning principles. You'll learn how to edit the data in a project and how to use different forms for editing the task data.

Chapter 6, "Entering Scheduling Requirements," shows how to define the special conditions that govern the scheduling of tasks in a project, including specific deadlines and sequencing requirements for the tasks.

Chapter 7, "Viewing Your Schedule," explains and compares the most popular views you can use in Microsoft Project to display the task list: the Gantt Chart view, the Calendar view, and the Network Diagram view.

Part III, "Assigning Resources and Costs"

Part III describes how to define and assign resources and costs to the tasks in a project.

Chapter 8, "Defining Resources and Costs," shows how to define the resource pool that you plan to use in a project and how to define the working and nonworking times for those resources. You'll learn how to sort , group , and filter the resource list and how to save the resource pool as a template for use in other project documents.

Chapter 9, "Understanding Resource Scheduling," explains how Project calculates a schedule when resources are assigned to tasks ”both when you first assign resources and when you change resource assignments. The detailed instructions for actually assigning the resources are covered in Chapter 10.

Chapter 10, "Assigning Resources and Costs to Tasks," shows how to assign resources and costs to specific tasks. You'll learn how to create assignments and then to modify the default schedule that Project creates by scheduling overtime, delaying or splitting assignments, and contouring the assignments. You'll also learn how to assign fixed costs to parts of a project. Finally, you'll learn how to view the resources, costs, and task assignments in useful ways for auditing the project plan.

Chapter 11, "Resolving Resource Assignment Problems," is a guide for troubleshooting problems in the schedule for assigned resources. Typically, some resources are scheduled for more work than they can possibly do in the time allowed; this is where you learn ways to resolve the conflicts.

Part IV, "Reviewing and Distributing the Project"

Part IV covers the part of the project cycle when you have completed the initial planning and need to review the schedule and refine it to ensure that it meets the objectives of the project. At that point, you generally want to publish the final plan in printed reports or on an intranet or on the Internet.

Chapter 12, "Reviewing the Project Plan," introduces features that help you review the task schedule for completeness and accuracy. You'll learn how to get an overview of the project to see if you can complete the project plan in a timely fashion and at an acceptable cost. You'll also learn how to view the task list through filters that focus on important aspects of the project and to sort and print the task list. You'll learn how to spell check the schedule and how to view the summary statistics for the project.

In Chapter 13, "Printing Views and Reports," you'll learn how to use the standard views and reports to publish a plan for a project.

Part V, "Tracking and Analyzing Progress"

Part V shows you how to keep track of actual work on a project and how to understand what is going on, with special emphasis on catching problems early so that corrective measures can be taken.

Chapter 14, "Tracking Work on a Project," deals with your role as project manager after work on the project begins. You'll learn how to save a copy of the finalized project plan to use as a baseline for comparison with what actually happens. This chapter teaches you how to track the actual beginning and ending dates for tasks, the actual work amounts, and the actual costs.

Chapter 15, "Analyzing Progress and Revising the Schedule," is an important presentation of ways to look at tracking information to see how well a project is meeting its objectives. Project offers many techniques and reports that you will learn to use in this chapter. This chapter emphasizes the use of earned-value reports.

Part VI, "Coordinating Projects and Sharing Data"

The chapters in Part VI discuss advanced topics that the beginning user will usually not encounter initially. Therefore, they are separated from the earlier parts, which cover the basic steps of developing and tracking a project schedule.

Chapter 16, "Working with Multiple Projects," explains how to link one or more subprojects to a master or summary project and how to link an individual task in one project to a task in another project. You'll also learn how to consolidate multiple projects and how to manage multiple projects that share a common resource pool.

Chapter 17, "Exporting and Importing Project Data with Other File Formats," describes how to export and import task, resource, and cost data with other applications and file formats, including the database formats. You'll also learn how to save entire projects in database formats.

Chapter 18, "Copying, Pasting, and Inserting Data with Other Applications," shows how to copy and paste selected data and objects between Project and other applications. You'll learn how to copy Project's timephased data into other applications and how to manage embedded and linked objects in Project and in other applications.

Part VII, "Using and Customizing the Display"

The chapters in Part VII describe how to take advantage of the extensive options that Microsoft Project provides for displaying the data in a project. Some of the views and reports described in Part VII are mentioned in earlier chapters as well. This section provides a comprehensive reference to all the major views and reports.

Chapter 19, "Using the Standard Views, Tables, Filters, and Groups," explains the many options for using tables, forms, graphic images, groups, and filters to display your project in a view.

Chapter 20, "Formatting Views," describes the formatting options for all the major views and how to create custom views. You'll also learn procedures, including tips and techniques, for changing the appearance of graphic elements and text display for categories of items and individual items.

Chapter 21, "Customizing Views, Tables, Fields, Filters, and Groups," shows how to modify and customize the components of views. You will learn how to create custom tables and filters, how to define custom fields to calculate values for special data needs, and how to create custom grouping of the data.

Chapter 22, "Using and Customizing the Standard Reports," explains how to use the standard reports to supplement the printed views, how to modify the elements in the reports, and how to create new reports.

Chapter 23, "Customizing Toolbars, Menus , and Forms," explains the options for customizing the display of the Microsoft Project interface. You'll learn how to change the standard toolbar buttons and how to attach commands and macros to a button. You'll learn also how to customize menus and how to create your own forms for data entry and review.

Part VIII, "Using Project Server and Project Professional"

Chapter 24, "Introduction to Microsoft Office Project Server 2003," focuses on enterprise thinking and an overall view of Microsoft Office Project Server 2003. This will help you see how all the pieces of Project Server 2003 fit together from a portfolio manager's perspective.

Chapter 25, "Enterprise Project Administration," describes functional system administration of Project Server 2003 for the PMO system administrator and others who need to know what settings are required to create the enterprise views your organization needs.

Chapter 26, "Enterprise Project Management," describes Project Web Access and Project Professional from a PMO and project manager's perspective.

Chapter 27, "Enterprise Resource Management," describes how executives, resource managers, and project managers view and use the resource information that is available via Project Web Access and Project Professional.

Chapter 28, "Enterprise Collaboration," describes how team members will use the document management and collaboration features of Project Web Access, including time tracking, status reporting, managing to-do lists, issues, risks, and document management.

Web Elements

Three chapters can be found on this book's companion CD.

Web 1, "Publishing Projects on the Web," describes how to save views of a project for HTML display on Web sites and intranets .

Web 2, "Using Visual Basic with Project 2003," is a basic guide for nonprogrammers who want to record and use simple macros in Microsoft Project.

Web 3, "Customizing and Administering Project Server Access," covers what you need to know about administering Project Server and customizing the Web pages it uses to represent the project data.