The Microsoft Project 2019 Workspace
In this section, I’m going to take you on a tour of the Project Workspace. We’re also going to start creating a very simple project. I’ll use that very simple project to demonstrate key points concerning the Project workspace.
Now, you’ve already seen this start screen. You’ll probably see this quite a few times during the course.
Although, as you’ll see a little bit later on. You may want to disable the start screen once you really get used to using Project 2019. You might decide that you can get along perfectly well without it.
Now let me give you a quick tour of the Start screen itself.
Over on the left, we have an area which gives us links to existing projects. We have a Recent section just there at the top and currently, for me this section is empty.
Once we start working on projects; you’ll start to see a list of recent projects appear just there. Then below that, there is a link to open other projects, which gives us access to a Windows Browse dialog.
You can browse your computer. As well as, you can browse any network locations you have access to. You can browse cloud areas, such as your One Drive storage.
We’re going to start with a new project. We won’t be using that part of the start screen on this occasion.
In the top right, we have some standard Windows buttons. The little question mark is Help. Note, the screen tip there for Help F1 is the keyboard shortcut.
Then, we have the Minimize. We have the Maximize or Restore. Depending on whether your screen is currently maximized or not.
And then, we also have a Close button. Below that, we have my name and the account under which I’m currently running Project 2019.
If you’re the only person that uses this PC and if you’re the only person that uses Project on this PC and you only have one account that you ever run Project under then this will always indicate that account.
But for example, you sometimes use a work account. Sometimes a personal account, if you share this PC with somebody else, you may want to switch between accounts. You have a facility just here to switch accounts. I’ll demonstrate that for you a little bit more fully later on.
Now, let me talk about the rest of the start screen and I’m going to say this once more. You may not see exactly the same as me.
It will depend on a number of things, but almost certainly the first thing you will see here is a blank Project thumbnail. I’m going to click on that in a little while and we’re going to create a new blank project. So, essentially Blank Project is the starting point for a new project. Let’s run through some of these others first of all though.
If you run projects that have an element of similarity, maybe you do building projects, marketing projects then you may already have a project that you’d like to base a new one on.
And the second thumbnail here, New from Existing Project, enables you to use an existing project as a starting point for a new one. The third thumbnail, New from an Excel Workbook lets you create a project from an Excel workbook.
And what this basically means is that you have perhaps a list of tasks on a worksheet in an Excel workbook and you want to make a list of tasks for starting point for a project.
The fourth thumbnail, New from SharePoint Task List, is a pretty similar kind of thing but in relation to SharePoint. So if you have a list of tasks in Microsoft SharePoint and you want to use those as the basis for a project you can use that option.
Now, the other thumbnails all correspond to different standard Project templates. So if I were working on a software development project I could use the first template there, Software Development Plan, and it would get me started on a typical set of tasks as a starting point for a software development project.
Now, you’ll see a whole list of these templates. These templates you may think of in the old terminology as boilerplates but nowadays we generally call them templates.
And there are lots and lots of them there. So Residential Construction is there, for example, New Business Plan is another one, but there are available online many, many templates that you can base new projects on.
And there is a Search facility at the top here. So if you wanted a Project plan for a particular thing you could do a search here. In fact, there are some standard searches, suggested searches as they call them underneath. So we have Projects, Schedules, Themes, Analysis, so on and so forth.
Let’s suppose, and this is definitely potentially going to be very useful, I wanted to look for a project plan for a wedding. So let me do a search for a wedding. This, of course, is an online facility so I need to be connected to the internet.
And let’s click the magnifying glass and it comes up with a Wedding Planner. If I were to click on that wedding planner then I would see a little bit more detail about what this wedding planner is.
So, it shows me the first few tasks, it gives me a description, it says Wedding Planner provided by Microsoft Corporation. It tells me how big it is. It gives me a little bit of a description of the wedding planner. Then, I could use that to create a wedding plan.
In fact, it’s not very far removed from what I’m going to be doing a little bit later on. But let me just close that for the moment and go back to this screen because apart from giving me potential project templates for a wedding there were search results from other Office applications.
Let’s look at PowerPoint for instance. There are three items found in relation to PowerPoint. Now each of these is a template for a PowerPoint presentation. So there’s a picture frame wedding photo album, a wedding seating arrangement plan, and also a simple wedding photo album.
Now there are other suitable wedding-related artifacts that can be used in Word, Publisher, and Excel. So we’re not really going to cover that in this course but they can be very useful links to other artifacts that you can use with the other components of Office. Having taken a look at that let’s go back to the Start screen and we just use the Back button up here.
And we’re going to create a blank project. Now as soon as I do this I want you to look at the bottom left-hand corner of the screen because a little message will pop up just for a few seconds that you’ll get used to seeing and after a while you’ll probably just ignore it, but I need to explain it to you briefly now and then in a little bit more detail later on.
So click on Blank Project and then look down immediately in the bottom left-hand corner and you’ll see a message that says New tasks are created in manually scheduled mode.
You’ll see later on there are two modes of scheduling. There’s manually scheduled and there’s auto-scheduled. Most of the time I tend to work in auto-scheduled mode.
And after you’ve been using Project for a while you will choose the mode which you prefer. The fact that I currently have this in manually scheduled mode and you may or may not have it in manually scheduled mode really doesn’t matter at the moment. We’ll come back to that a little bit later on.
What we need to concentrate on here is the workspace overall.
So first of all in the top left-hand corner, you have the Quick Access toolbar that I mentioned earlier on in the course. You may not see quite the same buttons as me there but we’ll come back to that in a couple of sections time.
And in the top right-hand corner, you have some standard Windows buttons. Let me just hover over those. So you have Minimize, Restore Down and also a Close button.
The main Ribbon is this. So it’s the big block right across the screen very near the top. I’m going to explain the Ribbon to you in quite a bit of detail again in a couple of sections from now.
Above the Ribbon in the middle is the name of the current project. We’ve just created a project so by default it’s called Project 1. If we created another one by default it would be called Project 2 and so on.
Now below the Ribbon, we have something called the Entry bar. And the Entry bar is something that we can use to enter and edit data into our project. You may or may not have the Entry bar shown. If you don’t see that then, don’t worry. I’m going to show you in a while how to show that if it isn’t already shown.
Basically, the kind of thing we use the Entry bar for is this. If I want to enter the name of the first task in my project I can click in the Task Name field there and then if I click in the Entry bar I could call it Task 1.
Having typed that I can click on the tick mark to the left of the task and that will become my first task. If I click down to the next row and maybe I intend to type Task 2 I could type Task 2, change my mind and click on the cross to the left of the Task Entry bar and that will cancel whatever I’m typing. So that’s the Entry bar. More on that later.
Below the Entry bar, we have the Timeline. I mentioned the Timeline much earlier on when I was talking about what’s new and the fact that you can have several timelines now in Project 2019.
You may or may not see the Timeline. If you don’t see it you can show it by going up to the Ribbon and clicking on View and roughly in the middle or just to the right of the middle you see a command there or a checkbox that says Timeline. If I uncheck Timeline you can see the Timeline disappears. Check it again and it comes back again. So that’s the Timeline.
When I’ve got some tasks it will show those tasks on the Timeline. Now, in fact, I’ve just entered one task there. It hasn’t got any work in it and the Timeline can be set to run over a period of time.
Now by default, my new project is starting today so that’s March the 4th. And because I haven’t got any tasks or work scheduled at the moment you’ll see on the right-hand end of the Timeline it also says March the 4th. So currently it’s not the most exciting project in the world.
Below the Timeline is the main project window and by default on my installation, I show a Gantt Chart. And a Gantt Chart actually comprises two paths. It comprises the list of tasks. It’s actually a table. And we refer to this as the Table. And on the right, we have the chart itself, which is normally a pictorial representation of the tasks in my project.
Now you may or may not have a Gantt Chart shown. If you don’t have a Gantt Chart shown you will find out soon how to show a Gantt Chart there. And there will be situations when you’ll want to see one of the many other types of chart that you can show in the main body of the display there in the main window.
Now just to give you a little bit more of an idea of how that’s going to look let’s go back to that first task, Task 1. I’m going to click in the Duration column and I’m going to say that this is a two-day task. Click elsewhere and there is my Gantt bar for a two-day task.
Now there are various things about that bar in terms of its color, its ends and so on that, each have significance. And we’re going to talk more about those later on but basically, as we start to build up a schedule we build up entries in the table on the left and each of those will be represented by a Gantt bar or other appropriate symbol in the chart on the right.
The next aspect of the workspace to look at is the Status bar across the bottom of the Project window. At the left-hand end, there are optional pieces of information. One of the ones that’s shown there are New Tasks of Manually Scheduled, which I mentioned earlier on in this section. And at the right-hand end, there are controls for the views. So we can do things like choosing the view of the project we currently have, and we can also use the zoom controls. And again more on those later.
And the last part of the workspace that I want to look at is what’s called the Backstage or Backstage View. Now what we’re looking at here is effectively a project. It’s a very simple project with one task in it at the moment, but this is where we work on the contents of our project.
The administration of projects, so doing everything from saving them to printing them to maybe sharing them that’s all done in what’s called the Backstage View or just Backstage. And if I go into Backstage View, and you can do that by clicking on File, you’ll see that Backstage View has a load of options. So we have Info, New, Open, Save, Save As, Print, Share, Export, Close, Account, Feedback, and Options. And we’ll be dipping in and out of here as we go through the course.
It’s also, for example, in the Backstage View where we can set up Project Information. When I’ve been using Backstage View I get back to my project again by using that Back button in the top left-hand corner. And that takes me back to my project.
So there we are. That’s all the basics of the workspace for now. In the next section, I want to take a quick look at Help so please join me for that.