Microsoft Project Professional Views

In addition to managing PWA client interface views, it is also important to understand the views available within Project Professional client.

NOTE

The views and features available in Project Professional are not the focus of this book; other books are available that focus on Project Professional client features and its capabilities, including views and reports available from within Project Professional client.

Consider reviewing the following book available from Sams Publishing for more in-depth information on Project Professional views: Show Me Microsoft Office Project 2003 by Brian Kennemer, ISBN 0789730693.

Views in Project Professional display a subset of your project, resource, or assignment data using a predefined format.

Project Professional client provides many predefined task, resource, and combination views. A combination view is a split view containing two panes. For example, the bottom pane view can show additional detailed information about the tasks or resources selected in the top pane view. Views may use different formats, including the Gantt chart, graph, form, sheet, table, or network diagram that shows dependencies between project tasks.

Creating and Modifying Views in Project Professional Client

All views have a predefined set of components. Also, all views have at least one filter specified as part of the view definition that defines or limits the data displayed. Sheet views and some Chart views start out using a predefined table to determine what data to display.

The table or filter that is part of the view definition can be replaced with any of the predefined tables and filters, or other custom tables and filters can be created and applied to the view. The tables can also be customized on-the-fly by inserting or hiding columns (fields). Autofilters, filters, grouping, and formatting also can be applied to a view.

To help create standards for Project Professional clients, project managers may want to define common views and their formats. Typically, this is a collaborative effort between project managers and your Project Server administrator. To define a common set of Project Professional views, the administrator opens the Enterprise Global template and defines or changes any views using the following steps:

1.	Start Project Professional client, and first connect to your Project Server. Select Tools, Enterprise Options, Open Enterprise Global from the menu.
2.	To review/change the settings under the View dialog tab, select Tools, Options. You might want to change items such as Currency, Symbol, and other attributes.
3.	Select Format, Text Styles from the menu and adjust the color or format of how task items such as milestones, summary tasks, or critical path tasks are displayed in project views.
4.	Create required views that are standard and appropriate for your project managers in your organization. You may also modify tables used in views by adding fields, such as Work, Actual Work, or other custom fields to any tables already defined while the Enterprise Global is open.

Managing Views in Microsoft Project Professional

In Project Professional client, you do your view management in three locations:

• Tools Organizer

• Tools Options dialog box

• View More Views dialog box

Remember that before you can start managing standard corporate views for Project Professional clients, you need to open your Enterprise Global template first.