Lesson10.8.Saving an Interim Plan

Lesson 10.8. Saving an Interim Plan

Figure 10-9. Saving an interim plan in the Save Baseline dialog box.

While a baseline plan records how the entire project looks before any progress is recorded, an interim plan is a snapshot of your project as it progresses. You can then compare interim plan data to baseline plan data to assess task progress.

Interim plans are not nearly as detailed as baseline plans. A baseline saves 20 pieces of information, whereas an interim plan saves only two pieces of information: the start and finish date of a task. You can save up to 10 interim plans at a time.

Although you generally would save an interim plan only after beginning task work, let's save an interim plan right now just for practice.

1. Select Tools You are going to save an interim plan, so...

2. Click the Save interim plan option.

   Notice that the Copy and Into boxes are no longer shaded. When saving an interim plan, you must select values for both the Copy and Into fields.

   • Copy: Specifies the fields you want to use to create the interim plan. For example, if you want to create an interim plan using the information in your baseline plan, select Baseline Start/Finish.

   • Into: Specifies the fields that you want to use to store the interim plan; in other words, the plan name.

   Now, select the name of the current plan and select a name for the new interim plan.

3. Click the Copy list arrow.

   Notice that there are 10 options from which to choose, one for each plan you can save.

4. Select Start/Finish from the list.

   The information in the Start and Finish fields will be recorded in the interim plan.

   Now choose where you want to store this information.

5. Click the Into list arrow and select Start1/Finish1.

   The interim plan information will be stored under this plan name.

   You can either choose "Entire project" to save an interim plan for the whole project, or choose "Select tasks" to save a portion of the project. Choose to save the entire project, as shown in Figure 10-9.

6. Click the Entire project option and click OK.

   After saving an interim plan, you can view the plan's start and finish dates by inserting its fields into the task sheet. For example, if you've saved three interim plans, you can view the dates saved in the third plan by inserting the Start3 and Finish3 fields into Task Sheet view.

QUICK REFERENCE

TO SAVE AN INTERIM PLAN:

1. SELECT TOOLS

   CLICK THE SAVE INTERIM PLAN OPTION.

2. CLICK THE COPY LIST ARROW AND SELECT THE NAME OF THE CURRENT INTERIM PLAN.

3. CLICK THE INTO LIST ARROW AND SELECT THE NAME FOR THE NEXT INTERIM PLAN.

4. CLICK THE ENTIRE PROJECT OPTION AND CLICK OK.

   OR...

   CLICK SELECTED TASKS TO SAVE A PORTION OF THE PROJECT SCHEDULE.