About the Custom Applications

In this chapter you’ll have the opportunity to create two applications: a Charged Cost application, and a Linked Expenses application.

Since Microsoft Project is not an accounting program, it doesn’t have built-in support for job costing and estimating for external customers. The rate and fixed cost information entered in a Microsoft Project project file can reflect our internal cost for a project or the prices that we’d charge to customers, but not both.

That’s where our two new applications come in.

The Charged Cost application allows you to track two sets of costs within one project so you can generate reports for internal and external use. To do this, we’ll use two rate tables and some code that switches between the two. Although this application was built (and is actually used) to track internal and external costs, it can do other things. For example, you might use it for testing different scenarios when planning a project: “Should we build our new line of widgets in our Kalamazoo plant or in our Springfield plant?”

The Linked Expenses application demonstrates linking Project task fields to external sources. The Linked Expenses application was designed to link the Fixed Cost field of a task to a cell in an Excel workbook to look up distance information. After you examine the application, you can create similar applications to retrieve information from Excel, Access, and other data sources for use in Project.

Note 

In Chapter 25, we created two custom fields for the Linked Expenses application. If you skipped this activity, go back to the “Practice with Custom Fields” sidebar in Chapter 25 and create these fields now.



Mastering Microsoft Project 2002
Mastering Microsoft Project 2002
ISBN: 0782141471
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 241

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