Chapter 5: Formatting and Printing Your Plan

Chapter at a Glance

Format categories of Gantt bars with the Gantt Chart Wizard, page 102. Create a custom formatted Gantt Chart view, page 104. Apply direct formatting, page 111. Customize and print reports to communicate details about the project plan, page 112.

In This Chapter, You will Learn How to:

• Customize a view and preview the way it will look when printed.

• Draw on the chart portion of a Gantt Chart view.

• Change the formatting of text in a project plan.

• Edit and print reports.

Tip 

Do you need only a quick refresher on the topics in this chapter? See the Quick Reference entries on pages xxv–xlviii.

In this chapter, you use some of the formatting features in Microsoft Office Project 2007 to change the way your data appears and then preview the results in the Print Preview window. As you might recall from Chapter 1, “Getting Started with Project,” a Project plan is really a database of information, not unlike a Microsoft Office Access database file. You don’t normally see all of the data in a project plan at one time. Instead, you focus on the aspect of the plan that you’re currently interested in viewing. Views and reports are the most common ways to observe or print a project plan’s data. In both cases (especially with views), you can substantially format the data to meet your needs.

The primary way in which Project represents tasks graphically is as bars on the chart portion of a Gantt Chart view. These are called Gantt bars. On a Gantt chart, tasks, summary tasks, and milestones all appear as Gantt bars or symbols, and each type of bar has its own format. Whenever you work with Gantt bars, keep in mind that they represent tasks in a project plan.

Tip 

This chapter introduces you to some of the simpler view and report formatting features in Project. You’ll find quite a bit more material about formatting, printing, and publishing your project plans in Chapter 10, “Organizing and Formatting Project Details,” Chapter 11, “Printing Project Information,” and Chapter 12, “Sharing Project Information with Other Programs.” Of particular note are the visual reports introduced with this release of Project. You work with visual reports in Part 2, “Advanced Project Scheduling.”

Important 

Before you can use the practice files provided for this chapter, you need to install them from the book’s companion CD to their default locations. See “Using the Book’s CD” on page xix for more information.