Microsoft Project for the Web Tutorial for Beginners - 2.5 Hours of Training

foreign says subscribe and click on the Bell icon to receive notifications we've made the accompanying exercise files for this tutorial available for free just click the link below in the video details to get these hello everyone and a very warm welcome to this course on Microsoft project for the web my name is Deborah Ashby and I'm a Microsoft it trainer and subject matter expert and I'm absolutely thrilled to be your host for this course now as you can see from the information on the screen I've been a trainer for a very long time and for a good portion of that I've been training project and for the most part that has meant that I've been training a project online which is a very complex product made for project managers pmos who manage multiple complex projects and in more recent times what Microsoft have recognized is that many people need to manage projects these days we have a lot of accidental project managers but don't necessarily need all of the functionality contained within Project online so they've designed an application that lives in the cloud that's accessible that's simple to use and contains that core functionality that most people who manage small to mid-scale projects are going to need and that's exactly what we're going to look at in this course and we're not just going to cover project for the web in this course we're actually going to cover three different applications and the reason why we're doing that is because they all tie together really nicely and Microsoft considers these three applications to be part of their basic project management offering so let's take a look at the applications that we're going to cover in this course we're going to start out by spending some time looking at Microsoft planner a Microsoft planner is part of Microsoft 3 six five and is absolutely perfect for managing task lists and to-do lists so if you have a very small team then this offering might be perfect for you so we're going to dive into planner we're going to take a look at some of the things that we can do with it and if you find this is a bit limited for what you need that is when you might consider progressing on to project for the web and the majority of this course is going to be focused on project for the web do not worry about that we're going to go through all of the functionality in project for the web we're going to compare it to things like Project online and planner so you can choose the right tool for you and we're going to go through all of that functionality that you might expect I'm going to show you how to create projects from scratch and using templates we're going to take a look at how we can add tasks and edit those task details we're going to view our tasks in a Gantt chart view or timeline view as it's now called and take a look at some of the functionality that we have for organizing and managing our projects we're also going to be taking a look at road map which is also part of project for the web and this gives us a high level overview of specific tasks across many projects and then finally in this course we're going to do a little bit on power bi reporting now you might be thinking why on Earth do we have that in this course well one thing you're going to find out over the next couple of sections is that project for the web has been built on the Power Platform which means that it integrates seamlessly with the other power applications that we have and one of those is power bi and the reason why I've added this one specifically into this course is because it is absolutely awesome if you want to create really great visual interactive reports based off of your project for the web data so I've added a section at the end where we go through some of that functionality so that you can present these reports to stakeholders and your CEO so what can you expect from this course well you have 54 video LED lessons and these lessons are all roughly five to ten minutes long so they're nice and bite-sized so you can squeeze them in when you have a spare few minutes and those lessons are organized across six logical sections so it's easy to find specific lessons at the end of each section there will be an exercise so you can practice the skills that you've learned and we also have multiple choice questions scattered throughout again so you can test your knowledge as you go along so this really is a course that is packed full of information so the only thing left to do here is take a seat in a comfy chair grab ourselves a tasty beverage and let's dive in to the first lesson project for the web is the latest offering from Microsoft for cloud-based project management project for the web provides simple easy to use project management functionality that can be used by project managers and team members to plan and manage projects of any size now project for the web is part of the Microsoft Project product family which includes Project online desktop client Project online and project server it Bridges the gap between basic task management using Microsoft planner and complex project management using Project online and project for the web lives in the cloud and it's built on the Power Platform and I'm going to speak a little bit more about that in just a couple of moments and it includes project home and project roadmap and of course we're going to explore both of those in a lot of detail in this course and finally project for the web has a very simple intuitive interface so it is easy for novice and accidental project managers to use now I want to go back to that point about project for the web living in the cloud and being built on the Power Platform now the Power Platform if you're not all that familiar with it consists of power apps which is mainly used for application development power automate which we use for workflow Automation and power bi which we use for business analytics and if you've ever built something like a dashboard in Excel then you may be quite familiar with the power bi platform so Microsoft have really leveraged the power of the Power Platform to seamlessly integrate business processes and Powerful reporting so project for the web is built on the same platform as these other applications which means we can do more complex things utilizing the Power Platform such as we can pull really nice complex reports out of project for the web utilizing power bi so this is one of the advantages that project for the web has over the other applications within the project family and another cool thing about project for the web is that it's also built on the Microsoft 365 platform and it works with a lot of the Microsoft 365 tools that we already use to collaborate with team members so how exactly does project for the wearable p4w as you sometimes might see it written fit into the current project management structure we have quite a few different apps now for projects so how does this fit in where is it going to be useful and why might you want to choose it well I think it's good to understand the background of project for the web and how it came about in order for you to make that decision there's a little known Forum on the Microsoft website called user voice and this forum gives users like you and I the opportunity to provide feedback on Microsoft products directly to the teams that develop them and if we look at the feedback for example related to Microsoft planner which is a basic tool available as part of Microsoft 365 to manage tasks users were requesting additional functionality things like creating subtasks of existing tasks requesting a Gantt chart View and the ability to create custom Fields you also get to see how many users have given this feedback an upvote so it kind of gives us an idea as to how many people would like to see this feature incorporated into the current Microsoft planner application so this feedback really allowed Microsoft to zero in on the most common tasks that users need to be able to do to manage tasks in Microsoft planner and it really pushed the project team at Microsoft to extend the capabilities of planner and these days with modern project management we need our projects to be collaborative and the younger generation your project users demand a simple clean interface and software that's easy to use so what would be the next stage up from basic task management in planner that has more functionality is collaborative and is simple to use for the tasks that 90 of people putting projects together would need well that is where we land on project for the web project for the web really fills that gap between simple task management in planner and full life cycle project management in Project online Microsoft really wanted to develop an application that lived in the cloud and contained the most common project management functionality based on user feedback they also wanted an interface that was clean and simple to use for novice project managers and accidental project managers those people who aren't trained pmos but find themselves in a project management role as part of their job so at the top end of the scale we have Project online and in particular project desktop and this is the full-on complex project management tool that requires a lot of training to be able to use all of its features effectively it's the most advanced tool in the project family but Microsoft have recognized that most people don't necessarily need that level of functionality and this is why we have project for the web you can see it slots in nicely in the middle just there and both Microsoft planner and project for the web are considered to be basic project management tools and as I said these two tools will serve as perfectly adequate for the majority of people who are managing basic team projects if you need something more complex then you would go for project online desktop now one thing to remember about project for the web is that it is the latest release from Microsoft and due to that it's continually evolving and improving so you might find that there are some things that you can't currently do in project for the web such as giving access to projects and tasks to external users but this is very much a work in progress and Microsoft have already stated that all new Innovations will be occurring in project for the web so project for the web seems to be definitely the direction they're going to go in in the future when it comes to managing projects so the sooner that you learn it and start using it the better it's going to be for you so how do you get project for the web well project for the web is available as part of three different subscriptions plan one Plan Three and plan five now plan one is the cheapest option out there and it only gives you access to project for the web via the Microsoft 365 portal so if you just want to manage very simple projects for your team then plan one might be the only thing that you need Plan Three and plan five which are the more expensive plans have access to Project online desktop clients so as part of both of those plans you can download the complex version of project and remember if you do go for plan one project for the web exists entirely in the cloud so you access it through your Microsoft 365 portal and it's built on the Power Platform it includes project home and project roadmap we're going to take a look at those a bit later on and as I mentioned it has a simple intuitive interface so it's easy to use for novice and accidental project managers so if your organization has already purchased a project subscription you basically have access to project for the web no matter which subscription you've purchased it's only plan one where you only have access to project for the web and for this training course that is absolutely fine we access it through the online portal all if I click on my app launcher to pull up all of my applications you can see it sitting just here this is how you access project for the web so the most important takeaway here is that when you're thinking about selecting one of the tools available to manage your projects think about exactly what you need to do if you're managing a very complex project you might want to go for Project online whereas if you want something a bit simpler then project for the web is going to be perfect so in the last lesson we've already compared the different tools we have to manage tasks and projects but I'd like to spend just a little bit more time going over this in more detail because it is so important when it comes to selecting the tool that's correct for the job you need it to do selecting the wrong tool could cost you a lot more money than you need we don't want to select something that's too limited for our needs but at the same time we don't want to select a tool that's too complex more expensive and exceeds the tasks we need to accomplish so we're going to focus on three applications just here Microsoft planner project for the web and project online desktop client so the most basic application that we have here is Microsoft planner and that's an app that's available through your current Microsoft 365 subscription it allows us to organize individual tasks and team tasks in an intuitive collaborative and visual task management interface it's a great tool if you're a team leader and you want to keep on top of the progress of a project if you need more complex project management tools such as grid and Gantt view dependencies scheduling road maps then you might need to think about upgrading from planner to its new big sister project for the web so project for the web is perfect for anyone who has been managing individual and team tasks in Microsoft planner but is finding the functionality a little bit Limited so along with everything you love about planner like task management board view teams and assignments we get additional functionality like grid view dependencies scheduling Gantt view Milestones it's the perfect middle of the road option and as I mentioned previously project for the web is also built on the Power Platform so we can harness the functionality of power apps like power bi for more complex reporting and visualizations is also fully integrated with Microsoft 365 and also Microsoft teams giving an overall better user experience and project for the web really does a great job at delivering that core experience for modern project management you can see in this little table here everything that it's included in project for the web compared to Project online the more complex version so really think about what it is that you need to do when you're working with a project to determine which one of these you go for if you are a pmo and you're managing lots of very large complex projects you might find project for the web a bit Limited at this moment in time as I said it is constantly evolving so that is where you might want to go for Project online or Project online desktop client these two are basically the same just one exists in the cloud and one is the desktop client that we can download and project online desktop is really the full fat Coke of the project family it's traditionally been the go-to tool for project managers and pmos that need to manage large complex projects and coordinate a portfolio of projects and resources it includes everything we love about Microsoft planner and project for the web and then some we can perform Advanced project management tasks like creating baselines critical paths resource and financial management portfolio and program management now whilst we can do everything in Project online desktop that we can in project for the web Project online is not built on the Power Platform so we're not going to easily be able to do things like integrate workflows and complex power bi reporting and visualizations so there are pros and cons to all of these so really think about what it is you're trying to do and select a product that meets your needs so just to round off this introductory section of the course I wanted to end by just discussing the different project plans in a little bit more detail because from my experience people do find this a little bit confusing because there's so many different versions of project out there now the first thing that you really need to know is that to use project for the web you need to have a subscription to one of the project plans and each plan gives you varying levels of functionality so really choose the one that accommodates your needs and the plans are named plan one Plan Three and plan five and these are new revamped plans that have been brought in by Microsoft in an attempt to standardize its naming conventions these plans now match more closely to the Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans E1 E3 and E5 and project for the web is available to access regardless of which of the project plans you purchase so let's understand what each plan gives us access to the first one we have is the most basic and that is plan one so project plan one is the former project Essentials plan it gives us access to project for the web only we can't use Project online or download the desktop client on this plan so this is the cheapest plan out of all of them and it enables customers to carry out basic project management tasks collaborate with others and build basic reports so this plan is really perfect for managing individual and team tasks in a collaborative Cloud environment the next plan we have which is a little bit more expensive is Plan Three and project plan 3 is the former Project online professional plan on this plan we have access to project for the web Project online and the option to download the desktop client for complex project management we can do everything from plan one plus manage resources submit timesheets build roadmaps manage costs and also leverage the full range of tools in the project desktop client so this is a good option for most project managers and teams that require more functionality than plan one and then finally we have the most expensive plan out of all of them plan five now project plan five is the former Project online Premium plan and of course we can do everything from plan one and plan three but plan 5 allows us to access advanced portfolio management tools so plan five is really for the pmo that needs to manage and report on large complex projects now if you want to see exactly what each of these project plans contain and compare them then I would highly recommend that you jump onto the Microsoft website and take a look at this page now to get here you can simply type in compare project plans into Google or Bing and it's going to take you directly to this page and you can see here I'm currently clicked on cloud-based Solutions we have plan one Plan Three and plan five and of course my pricing is in pounds but depending on where you're located this should update with the currency for your region now if we scroll down this is where we're going to get a more detailed view of exactly what each one of these plans includes so it's definitely worth having a little look through to make sure that the plan that you're selecting is going to be sufficient for your needs and just as a side note if you take a look at the top here we also have another tab that says on-premises Solutions so if we click on this this is where we get our Standalone versions so if you don't have a Microsoft 365 subscription and you want to download the latest version of project you can do that from here and the price is a lot more obviously because you're buying it outright it's not a subscription model so just be aware that those are there obviously this is completely out of scope for this course because we're going to be focusing on project for the web but that's where you can go to get an overview of exactly what each of these project plans includes select the one that meets your needs in this first exercise of the course I'd simply like you to set yourself up for success so I'd like you to make sure that you've been through all of the lessons in this section and that you have a good understanding of what project for the web is and how it fits within the Microsoft Project family of applications I'd like you to ensure that you've compared project for the web with Microsoft planner and project online and you've made a determination about which tool is going to best suit your needs and if you've decided that that tool is going to be project for the web you need to ensure that you've signed up for plan one Plan Three or plan five so that's all I need you to do in this first exercise see how you get on with that and I will see you in the next section for the next section you'll want to download the course exercise files click the link below in the video description to get these you can also scroll through the details to find time stamps for each section in this course if you're enjoying this training please leave us a comment it's time now to leave Microsoft planner behind and progress on to project for the web because if you've been managing your tasks in Microsoft planner but you're finding that there are certain things that you need to be able to do and you can't then the next step up would be to use project for the web and we spoke a lot in the introductory section of this course about the difference between planner project for the web and project online and we also compare to the different tools together to see the pros and cons of both so I'm not going to go over that again in this lesson we're going to dive straight into project for the web so I just want to start out by making sure that everybody is clear on how we Access Project for the web now remember in order to access project for the web you need to have a project subscription either plan 1 plan 3 or plan 5. any of these plans will give you access to project 4 the web but remember if you choose plan 1 which is the cheapest option you only have access to project for the web you won't have access to be able to download the desktop client and use Project online so just remember that now currently I'm still within the planner app so how can I quickly get out of here and get into project for the web well as you would imagine because it is integrated into Microsoft 365 we can access it via the app launcher so let's go all the way over click on our app launcher and there it is just there let's click to open it's going to open a brand new web browser and it's going to load up project for the web and if this is the first time that you are accessing project for the web then yours is going to look fairly similar to mine I don't have anything saved to my favorites and I don't have any recent project plans but this is the starting point for using and building a project plan in project for the web it's super simple it's part of Microsoft 365 which means you can also access this by downloading the mobile app so that you can work on your project plans when you're on the go and just so there's no confusion if we go back to our Microsoft 365 home page we would do exactly the same from here as we do in planner in order to load up project for the web we simply click on the app launcher and select project from our applications list so the first thing that we should probably do here is just take a quick tour around the project for the web interface so that we understand what we're looking at unfortunately this is a very simple and straightforward interface and this is one of the advantages of using project for the web as opposed to Project online comparatively speaking project for the web is a lot easier to use and understand now in the last lesson we were working in this screen and if you recall I didn't have anything listed underneath recent projects but now I do I have this here Untitled project and that's just a project that I've just opened a few seconds ago and so it's populated underneath my recent list and this is what you're going to see in this section on this first page you're going to see any projects that you've been working on and any projects that you've recently opened so it makes it super quick and simple to Simply access them again to open a project it's a clickable link we just click and it's going to open up that project in the main window now this project doesn't contain any tasks it's just a test one that I created I didn't even bother giving it a name so it has the default name of Untitled project now of course what I can do here is I can click on the name and it's going to open up this little pane on the right hand side which allows me to give this a name so let's just call this my name and test I'm the project manager that's absolutely fine we can click on close and that's going to update notice we have different views so this is very reminiscent of when we were working in planner we can view our project plan in Grid View Board view timeline view and chart view as well and of course we're going to get into this a lot more as we go through this section for the time being let's click on the home button just to go back to that home screen what you'll also notice with any files that you see listed in recent is that if we hover our Mouse over them we have the ability to mark them as favorites so so if these are project plans that we're working on all the time this guarantees they're going to be at the top of the list and we can also click the three dots to see more information so again this is very reminiscent of the menus that we were looking at when we were working in planner so just be aware of that the other headings that we have here are shared with me so if somebody has created a project plan and they've added you to that project plan that is essentially shared with you and you'll see it listed underneath here and then finally you can see all of the projects that have been created by you and once again when I've just been playing around with this and testing various things out you can see I have a few different projects in here now this is a little bit too messy for my liking I'm going to keep debt test but I can probably delete these other three so let's take a look at how we can delete a project if we no longer need it because we need to go through a few different menus in order to do this so let's open up this bottom project and this is just some test data that we have in here just to give you an idea as to what this is going to look like when we start actually building our own project plan but in order to delete this plan I need to go all the way over to the right hand side click on the three dots and jump into project details and then from here we need to click the three dots again and this is where we're going to find delete project so I'm going to say yes let's delete this and if I go back to create it by me and refresh my browser I should find that that's now gone so I'm going to do exactly the same for these other two and I'll join you back here in a couple of seconds now when it comes to road maps we delete those in a slightly different way now if you're not sure what a road map is again we're going to get into that a bit later on in this course but if you want to know how to delete one if we click on this one just here Untitled roadmap and then we need to click on the title instead and that's where we have this pane open up on the right hand side and right at the bottom we can delete the roadmap so a slightly different process for projects and road maps so now my list looks a lot tidier I just have Dev test showing in my recent now what else do we have on this main window well I have a link at the bottom which is going to take me to Project online and then I also have a filter option just here so if I have lots and lots of different project plans I can type in a keyword to filter this list in the top right hand corner this is where we're going to find our profile picture which gives us access to view our Microsoft 365 account I have a help button just here and then of course we have the Cog icon which allows us to access some basic settings so this is where we can come to do things like maybe change the theme of our project window so I'm going to change this to just the office theme and then the only other thing we need to point out here is that we have a favorite section at the top currently I don't have anything in there but if I was to mark for example this plan debt test as a favorite by clicking on the star it's going to move it up into this favorites area and then of course finally we have the new project button and this is where we can come to create a brand new project and there's a few different ways that we can do this we can start with a blank project we can create a road map again I'll discuss that a bit later on or we can import a project so if we've created a project in the desktop client or in Project online we can import that into project for the web we can also start off by using a template for our project as well so this is going to give us the basic structure the basic outline and means we're not just faced with a blank project that we have to construct as cells so these templates can be particularly helpful for example if I was to choose this one just here employee onboarding you can see I get a little preview as to what that's going to look like I can see the key benefits so it's going to help me manage the onboarding process and documentation it includes steps for it and HR onboarding tasks and it allows me to organize communicating with the new employee from post offer acceptance to asking them for feedback so if I choose use template to load this up it's going to open up this brand new project plan with a lot of the steps already in here I have tasks I have subtasks I have duration dates start dates labels things like that and of course all of this can be customized so that it works for whatever it is that you're trying to manage but this is just a really great way of getting the structure and the Bare Bones in place with very little effort now I'm going to click back on the home icon just to go back to the home page now notice now that we've created that new project employee onboarding is listed underneath recent I should also find it underneath created by me so everything ties together really nicely and if we want to switch to another application we have our applications launcher in the top left hand corner which allows us to jump between different applications that are part of Microsoft 365. but when it comes to the interface and the first screen that you're going to see when you log into project for the web that's pretty much all there is to it throughout the balance of this section we're going to create our own project plans and we're going to start in the next section by importing an existing project plan if you've created a project plan in Project online or maybe in the project desktop client then you can easily import that into project for the web now why might you want to do that well remember when you're using the desktop client the project plan is basically accessible to you it's a lot harder to collaborate on project plans that exist solely in the desktop client as opposed to having them online in project for the web remember because this is a Microsoft 365 application that we access through the browser it means that any projects that we create in here we can access from anywhere where we have an internet connection it doesn't rely on us being at our desk and having access to the full desktop client version and because Microsoft have said that going forward they're going to try and push their users towards using project for the web it might be that you want to transition now and start moving your project plans across so this is going to be really helpful to you to know how you can import a project plan into project for the web now this is a straightforward process we just click on the new project button and underneath the create group we have an import project option so let's click on this so it says import from Project desktop this will create a new project for the web project separate from your project desktop project note that some project desktop features can't be imported into project for the web so what does this small but very important message mean when it's telling me that I'm going to import from Project desktop it's telling me it's going to create this import as a brand new project in project for the web that is entirely separate from the project desktop project so don't think that if you import it and then you make changes to the project in the desktop client that it's going to update in project for the web it's not linked in any way it's effectively a separate project and also because project desktop client is the most complex Advanced version of project that we have if you're using features in the desktop client that aren't available in project for the web those features are not going to be imported so it's really important to understand what you're doing here and if you actually do want to import your project in now for us in this example it's absolutely fine I have a very basic project plan that I created in Project desktop and it's really just the start of a wedding plan and this is kind of the project that we're going to be working on throughout this section of the course so let's click on choose dot MPP file so I've navigated to the folder where I have this stored and here it is weddingplanimport.mpp and you will find this file in the course files folder if you want to practice importing this as well so let's click on open and you can see it says import complete your project has been imported from Project desktop to project for the web some features in Project desktop weren't supported or needed to be changed to allow the import the project calendar has been changed to match the default project for the web calendar for your organization other changes are listed in the following table so you can see here manual tasks is unsupported in project for the web and I've got four manual tasks in this project so the changes that have been made during the import is that it's changed all of the manual tasks to automatically scheduled tasks now for me that is not a big deal at all so I'm going to click on OK and there is my imported project and it pretty much looks exactly the same as in Project desktop client apart from those things that it couldn't import so I can now carry on working on this project plan in project for the web it makes it a lot easier for me to collaborate with other people on this project plan and of course it also gives me access to the Power Platform and the applications that reside in there and we're going to talk a lot more about the significance of project for the web being part of the Power Platform a bit later on the final thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to give my project a more meaningful name because simple project plan isn't particularly interesting so let's click on the name and once again we can just simply go over to this pane on the right hand side and I'm just going to call this we'll call this test wedding plan because we're going to create another one in a moment so this one is going to be ADD test close this down it's now updated and then when we go back to home you can see there it is sitting underneath recent so far in this section we've seen how we can import a project from Project desktop we've seen how we can use a template to help us build a project but we haven't seen how we can create a project from scratch so let's take a look at that now once again we're going to go to the new project button and this time we're going to create a new blank project so this is basically your starting point it's not going to have any tasks listed in here we're starting with a blank canvas by default we have Untitled project at the top here and we know how we can change this we can simply click on it it's going to open up this pane on the right hand side and we can rename this project now I'm going to create the project that we're actually going to be working on throughout the bulk of this section and we are going to stick with the wedding plan the one we imported was kind of a test wedding plan this is going to be the real one so I'm going to change this to final wedding plan I'm the project manager and the default start date currently is simply today's date and you can see underneath here the Finish date because I haven't set a star or a finish date it's just both showing us today's day the duration is zero days because we don't have any tasks on there yet nothing's been completed and basically all of these statistics are at zero because we don't have any tasks added just yet then right at the bottom we have calendars so it's going to be using the default work template now we don't have any other options so we're going to select this one and click on the close now just a side note about that default work calendar that's automatically applied to all project plans that you create the default work calendar is based on a working day of nine to five Monday to Friday so if you work different hours to that and you want to apply a different calendar to your project plan then that's something that you need to create in power apps now remember project for the web exists on the Power Platform so this is a reasonably simple task which we'll look at a little bit later on in this course but for now the only thing you need to know is that the default work calendar is Monday Friday 9 to 5. so now we have our blank project plan template and we have numerous different default column headings for our project plan we have name quick look assigned to and duration and notice that we have an add column button on the end here which is going to allow us to customize the columns that we see just here and we're going to talk more about that in the next lesson we also have underneath here is an add new task button so this is fairly straightforward if we want to add tasks to this project plan we simply click on the add new task button in order to do that now of course there's a lot of things we can do here we can add tasks we can create subtasks so on and so forth and we're going to cover all of that as we go through this section for the time being just know where to go to create a new blank project plan and how you can change the name so now that I've created this new blank project plan I want to add other people to this project plan because it's not just me managing it I have other people helping me so this again is extremely similar to when we're working in planner if you take a look over on the right hand side we have a group members button and from here I can add members to create a group or if I already have a group set up I can choose an existing group so again this is where this integrates across to those Microsoft 365 groups so if I choose add to group I can then select a group that already exists maybe it exists in teams or SharePoint or Microsoft 365 groups if we scroll down to the bottom you can see there is my Microsoft 365 phase one Global rollout plan that we created in planner so if I wanted to add to this particular project plan all of the members of the Microsoft 365 rollout plan I can simply select it from here now obviously this was a business plan and the one I'm doing is more of a personal plan and I don't want to add all of the members so I'm going to go to create a group for the final wedding plan and if I click the drop down just here I can see the group name I can add a description if I want to and then I can set the Privacy so I can create a private plan or a public plan now I don't want everybody looking at my wedding plans so this is going to be private and then I can go through and add members to this plan now as I only have the group of people that we used in the planner section set up for this training course I'm going to add those as well so let's pretend for this particular plan that these are family members or friends so I'm going to add Ben I'm going to add Olivia I'm going to add Jack and also Andrea so there we go I think that is enough so all I need to do here is click on the create button and after a few seconds this will now update and I can see that this now has five group members and I can see them all listed just here so that is how simple it is to create a project plan from scratch to rename it and also add members over the next few sections we're going to take a look at how we can customize some of these column headings and then we're going to start adding some tasks to our plan in this lesson we're going to take a look at how we can customize the column headings in our project plan because what you'll see is when you create a new project plan you're going to have some default column headings in there for example in this project plan we have name quick look assign to and duration and then right at the end we have an add column button to add any new columns and if we hover over each of the column headings it's going to show us a screen tip to let us know what type of information is held in there for example in the quick look column this is going to let me know if my task has any notes or attachments I'm going to be able to see all the people assigned to a task in that column the duration and then as I mentioned I can add my own additional columns now when we click on the add column drop down notice that we have a few preset columns in there so we can add information to our project plans such as the percentage complete of the task I could add a column that tells me what bucket the task is located in I could add a column that shows me of this task has any dependence after or if it depends on anything else I can add columns that show me the effort the finish time if I've got any labels assigned or what the priority or the start date is so we have a few presets in there so if we just add one of them I've added buckets notice that it adds it directly onto the end if we click add column again and choose something else I'm going to add priority add column again let's add percentage complete as well so very quickly there I've just added three brand new columns now these have all been added onto the end but of course we can rearrange our columns if we want to we can even hide our columns from The View just by clicking that drop down arrow so I've hidden percentage complete if I want to bring that back again I need to click on ADD column and just add that column back in again so really nice and straightforward now what about if I want these arranged in a slightly different order maybe I don't want all of these at the end well rearranging our column headings is a simple case of dragging and dropping and we can also resize our columns as well to accommodate the text contained within so if we for example grab the priority column we can simply drag and drop it into its new location so I'm going to put it in between quick look and assigned to notice that when I hover my mouse over the column boundaries I get that double headed Arrow which is going to allow me to resize those columns and again this is a simple drag and drop so I can really make these as wide or as narrow as I need them to be and this is quite good if you have quite a few column headings you want to fit them all on one page so you don't have to scroll it's definitely a good idea to have a little play around with this and resize them so everything looks nice and neat now my name column is a little bit wide so I'm just going to drag that in so everything fits onto the page nicely and I think that's looking pretty good so far now when we click on ADD column again notice that aside from the preset columns that we have in here we have a new field button at the top which is going to allow us to add or create our own custom Fields so it might be that I want a column that doesn't necessarily fit into those pre-built columns that we have in the list and we can do that simply by clicking on the new field button at the top of that list now the first thing we need to do here is we need to Define what type of field we're creating so if I click the drop down I have a few different field types text date number yes no and choice and we're going to explore a few of these now I'm going to add a column that tells me what team this task is assigned to so I'm simply going to select text for this first example I then need to give my field a name so this is going to show team information so I'm just going to type team and click on the create button and you can see that that has added that very nicely as a brand new column and of course I can rearrange and widen those columns let's add another new field and this time we're going to add a yes no field now what this actually means is that however I was looking at this project plan will get a drop down in this column where they can choose yes or no so this is pretty good if you want to limit people to just one of two options in a specific column and you don't just want them free typing anything they like into that column so let's give this a type of yes no and I'm going to give this a field name of mandatory so whoever's filling out this column they're going to get a choice of yes or no as to if this task is mandatory so let's add another new field and this time we're going to add choice so this is where we can give whoever's completing this project plan a choice of different options to select and this is good for a couple of different reasons it means that what's going into the column is consistent information because they can only choose what's in the list it prevents people from just free typing whatever they feel like into a column and you can see there by default we have three choices but we can add more choices if we choose to so let's give this field a name and this is going to be location because the wedding is taking place in one location but we have different teams of people located in other locations in the UK so let's add in the different location choices so London Oxford and let's do a third one of Cambridge I could add another choice just here but I'm not going to I'm going to stick with those three and notice that we have a Color Picker next to each of these as well so if I want to make this project a little bit more colorful and really make these stand out from the others I can choose to highlight these choices in different colors so let's just go for some nice pastel colors now when I click on create it's going to add that location column and when our tasks get added people are going to be able to select from a drop down menu now notice a little drop down next to location doesn't give us our choices until we add a new task if I want to edit any of these fields I can simply click the drop down and choose edit change the name and update and the same for locations so because I've selected choices here when I choose edit I can go in and change those choices if I want to so the next thing to do here is start adding some tasks into our project plan so that we can see these columns in action and that's exactly what we're going to do in the next lesson so now we're at the stage where we can start adding tasks into our final wedding plan now before we get going with adding in our tasks to this plan I want to take some time to talk to you about start and finish dates because these are really important in Project now if you take a look at the project plan title where it says final wedding plan notice underneath there it says the 9th of August to the 9th of August and the reason why it says that is because this is when I created this plan so that's actually a couple of weeks ago now when I first created this and because I don't have any tasks in this plan currently it's just giving me 9th of August to 9th of August as we add tasks into this plan you're going to see that this finish day is going to change So currently my project starts on the 9th of August and finishes on the 9th of August now if we click on this because it is a clickable link it's going to pop open a little details pane on the right hand side and this is really where you can come to define the start date of your project now notice here that we can change the start date we can click on the little calendar planner icon just here and input our own start date but we can't change the Finish date the Finish day is automatically defined based on the tasks that you have in your project so depending on what the duration is of the last task that's going to Define our finish date and what you'll often find is that you'll input in all of your tasks you might assign some durations to those different tasks and you might find that once you've done that your project ends up finishing at a later date than you first planned for example if I want to have this wedding in the summer once I've input all of my tasks I might find that the actual finish day of all of the tasks is in the winter so I'm going to want to change the date that I'm starting this wedding plan so the start and finish date is really important now don't worry you can change the start date once you've added in all of your tasks you can even change the start date if you've added details into your tasks as well and by default when you create your first project it's just going to give you a start date of the date when you create the file so for me that was the 9th of August now as I said I'm working a few weeks in the future at the moment because I created this a couple of weeks ago so I want to Define first of all when I want my project to start now just for argument's sake to make this nice and easy I'm going to set this to a date in the future so let's say I want this project to start right after New Year on the 2nd of January so we're going to go into our calendar picker and in this case we're going to choose the second of January 2023. if we close this pane down now if you take a look in the top left hand corner you can see it says 2nd of January 2023 to the 2nd of January 2023 so these are my current start and finish dates of this project and this is going to change automatically as I start to add in new tasks so just bear those start and finish dates in mind as you're working through your project plan I'm going to show you a little bit later on how you can move your entire project simply by changing that start date and how it shifts everything else along to where you want it to start or finish but for the time being that is it for this lesson in the next lesson we're going to start adding tasks into our project plan so now we've set our project start date to the 2nd of January 2023 it's time to start adding some tasks into our project plan now I'm going to show you how to add a couple of tasks we're going to complete some of the fields and then I'm going to leave you to add the rest of the tasks in yourself to give yourself a little bit of practice now we're doing a wedding plan but of course this could be some kind of business plan anything you like that is technically a project so you don't necessarily have to do exactly the same project that I'm doing if you have your own project that you'd like to plan out then please feel free to add those tasks instead however if you would like to follow along with me I've put into a spreadsheet the tasks that we're going to add into the project plan and you'll find this spreadsheet in the course files folder available for you to download so let's just have a quick look at that spreadsheet so here is that file it's called final underscore wedding underscore plan underscore tasks.xlsx and this is a very simple spreadsheet where I've really planned out the tasks that I'm going to add into my project plan now I haven't added all of the detail into this spreadsheet I simply have the name of the task the priority and currently who that task is going to be assigned to obviously there is a lot more information that we can add into every single task but that's what we need in order to get these tasks into our project plan and I would really recommend this before you start delving too far into the details and worrying about things like how long each task is going to take I like to just get a basic structure of my tasks into the project plan first and then I can go into the details of each of those tasks now you'll see here in the spreadsheet I've kind of got a little bit of structure to the tasks that I'm going to add you can see that some of these are indented and some of these are in bold now we're going to reflect this structure within the project plan and we do that by using what we call summary tasks and subtasks now I'm not going to talk about those in this particular lesson but just keep that in the back of your mind for later lessons when I show you how we can add this type of structure for the time being I'm simply going to start typing in the names of these tasks and adding in some of these basic details and what I'm going to do is when we have these summary tasks in capital letters I'm going to leave those out for the time being so I'm going to start by adding in agree budget and approach and then set wedding date so let's deal with the first one agree budget and approach the priority of this is important and it's assigned to myself and Ben so let's add that into our project plan so where we have add new task let's click just here it opens up an editable field I'm going to type in the name of the first task now you can see that as soon as I type that in and click away it completes some basic default information in each of these columns now in this First Column the quick look column this isn't a column that we have to import anything into this is going to update automatically with an icon which will indicate if this task has a note an attachment or if it has any checklist items again we'll delve into that in a little bit more detail later on but know that this is automatically populated depending on what you've attached to this task the next column along is the priority of this task which by default your tasks are going to be set to medium priority but of course we can click the drop down and we have some other options in here now I think I have this as important in my schedule so I'm going to choose important from here the next column is who this task is assigned to now once again if I click this little plus to assign this task you can see it's going to pull up a list of all of the members of my plan now you may or may not have added members to your plan in the earlier lesson if you did then you're going to select members from your own team you're not going to have exactly the same as what I've got here if you're doing this completely on your own and you haven't added any members to the group then you can simply assign all tasks to yourself for the purpose of this training course now agreeing the budget and approach to this wedding is going to be the job of the bride and the groom so lucky me that is myself and my partner Ben so I'm going to assign both of us to this task now the rest of these columns here things like duration bucket percentage complete team so on and so forth I'm not going to worry too much about these at the moment as I said I'd just like to get all of my tasks in my schedule first of all and then I go into the details so I'm not going to worry about duration we're going to take a look at buckets a bit later on percentage complete we're not going to worry too much about that but what about teams so each of these tasks is going to be assigned to a particular group of people a particular team of people now I set this up this is one of our custom Fields as a free text field so I can type in whatever I like into here now what I would actually prefer for this particular column is to have a drop down list of the different teams that can be assigned to this task because that helps me control what people are typing into this field so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to edit this field and I'm going to convert it to a choice so let's click the drop down next to team and I'm going to say I want to edit now unfortunately here there isn't an option which will allow me to easily convert this to a different field type so I'm going to delete the field and we're going to re-add this in so let's go back to add column I'm going to say New Field but this time I'm going to make this a choice field I'm still going to call my field name team but then I can add some choices that people can select from so maybe one of the teams is the top table maybe another team is the Bridesmaids maybe another team is the groomsmen let's add another Choice we'll have made of honor and then a final one will have a group of people called guests if I want to make this a little bit more interesting I can also color code my choices so if I hover over where we have top table notice I have a little Color Picker icon just here and I can choose different colors for each of these choices so let's choose some nice pastel colors we'll just go through and add a color for each of those and click on create so now I have my new field over here I actually want to move this so that it is just after percentage complete so I can simply drag and drop so now if I want to assign this particular task to a specific team which is going to be the top table I can click the drop down and there are my choices so I've been able to easily control what is input into this field if there are lots of different people working on this project plan is this a mandatory task well yes it is we need to agree the budget before we can proceed and where is this going to take place well I have three different locations where things are happening for this wedding the actual wedding is going to take place in Oxford but both myself and Ben live in London so when we're agreeing the budget and approach that's going to occur in London and that's all the detail that I'm going to add for this first task let's refer back to our spreadsheet because the next task to add is setting the wedding day and this is urgent we really need to get that wedding date solidified so that we can start doing everything else so this is an urgent task again that is assigned to both myself and Ben so let's add this one in as well we're going to click on new task again set wedding date and remember you can also press the Tab Key to move across to the next field now this one is going to be urgent so let's select that and it's going to be assigned to myself and Ben as I said I'm not going to worry too much at this stage about the duration or the bucket but I am going to assign this to a team so again this is the top table yes this is mandatory we definitely need to set a wedding date and this is going to occur in London so very simple to add in these basic tasks so what I would then do is go through all of these tasks the ones that aren't showing in bold or capital letters and add all of those tasks in now the reason why I'm leaving out these is because these ones here showing in bold are what we call summary tasks and I'm going to show you how you can add those in and structure this correctly when we talk about summary and subtasks so at this stage it's time for you to go away and add in the rest of these tasks as I said this isn't an exact science if you're assigning things just to yourself or you don't get the priority exactly the same as what I've got it here it doesn't matter a great deal just as long as you you know the process of adding these different things into your project plan so once you've added in all of those tasks into your project plan it should look something like this and as I said I haven't really changed a great deal of the detail on any of these tasks I've simply assigned them a team I've set whether it's a mandatory task and I've also set the location so you can see we have everything running all the way through to the last task which is the wedding day task now notice at the bottom I have a task that's called Untitled and that's just one that I've accidentally added by pressing return after adding the wedding day task so if you want to delete a task that you don't need this is a very simple case of selecting the task and we can select any task by clicking on the task number we can then right click and from the contextual menu we have delete task or alternatively we can click on the three dots and we have delete tasks from there also note some of the other options that we have in here so we can do things like cut copy and paste tasks if I want to insert another task I can choose to insert a task above which is going to give me another Untitled task I can copy links to tasks and I can also complete tasks and something else that we're going to be taking a look at in this lesson is we can make certain tasks subtasks now before we get on to that let's just delete out these two Untitled tasks at the bottom so in order to select multiple tasks you can select the first one hold down control and select the second one and if you want to select a block you can use the shift key hold that down to select a block now I just want to select this one hold down control select the next one I'm going to right click and I'm going to delete out these two unwanted tasks so let's now talk about adding a bit of structure by creating summary and sub tasks now creating summary and subtasks really does make our project plan a lot easier to read it might be that we want to group or break up our tasks into different phases or different sections to add a bit of structure to our project because currently at the moment we simply have a big long list of tasks and we have 33 of them currently just in a big long list with no formatting and no structure now let's refer back to the spreadsheet that we were looking at earlier now when I asked you to add in these tasks I told you to leave out all of the ones that we have in bold and in capital letters and that's because we're going to add those in now now you don't have to do this but I do highly recommend it because it's going to make organizing your tasks and overall project a lot simpler so let's start with the first one here I just have a task at the top called Wedding plan now this isn't really a task there's no action to be carried out on it it's just something that I like to have at the top because it's an easy way of seeing the entire duration of my project so let me show you what I mean let's add this task in so again right at the bottom we have add new task now remember by default it's going to add this in at the bottom I'm just going to type in in capital letters wedding plan and press the Tab Key now I'm not going to complete any other field for this particular task but what I am going to do is I'm going to move this task to the top of the list now if you want to move tasks around this is where we use this little icon of dots just here notice as I have my mouse over it I get a little hand icon which means I can click pick up the task and drag and drop it wherever I feel so I'm going to drag it all the way to the top of this list and I'm going to drop it right up here above task one and you can see the project will reorder that numbering now I'm going to do exactly the same for the rest of the items in bold in this list so I'm going to add in preparation a tire select an order wedding dress guests reception venue so on and so forth and I'm going to drag them to the relevant area in the project plan now I'm going to do that off camera and I'm going to do it in exactly the same way that I added in the wedding plan so join me back here in a couple of moments once I've done that so now I've added in all of those summary tasks and move them into the correct positions within the project plan but they still don't really stand out very much and currently these are still all individual tasks we don't have any tasks that are subtasks of other tasks now where we have wedding plan at the top this is something I like to add in which gives me an overview of the entire task list so effectively what I want to do here is I want to make a wedding plan what we call a summary task a top level task and every other task in this project plan is going to be a sub-task of that so in order to do this we need to select every task in this project plan apart from wedding plan and make it a subtask so to do that I'm going to click on task number two by clicking on the task number I'm going to scroll all the way down to the last task which is wedding day hold down shift and select task number 45 then I'm going to hover my mouse over any of these tasks until I get the three dots let's click and choose make subtask now what you might have noticed there is that these tasks have indented very slightly and if we scroll all the way back up to the top of the project plan you can now see that wedding plan is showing in bold with this little collapsible and expandable Arrow so this means that I can click on this Arrow and it's going to collapse up my entire project plan and the reason why I like to have this here is because when we start adding in durations for these other tasks it's going to reflect in this top level summary task so I can see exactly the duration of the entire project because it will be the duration of every single task in the plan now let's go through and create more summary and sub tasks now here I have preparation attire and select an order wedding dress and in my spreadsheet I have these as effectively summary tasks of each other so I'm going to select task number seven hold down control and select task number eight and I'm going to make those a subtask of Select an order wedding dress I'm then going to select task number six and I'm going to make that a subtask of a tire and you guessed it I'm going to select task number five and I'm going to make that a subtask of preparation so now I can collapse up these different sections and really hone in on exactly what I'm interested in so we're adding structure into our project now don't forget that we can also change the size of these columns simply by dragging this out and in so if you're struggling to see your task names you might want to resize those let's go through and the next summary task that we have here is guests so I'm going to select the task below that's these four this time I'm going to hold down shift to select the block and we're going to make those subtasks of guess just to note if you want to undo what you just did you can also promote the subtask as well let's select task 19 to 21 by holding down shift we're going to make those subtasks and we're going to go through and do the same for each of these headings let's make these subtasks of catering we then have our two tasks related to flowers I'm going to make those a subtask we then have our tasks related to photography for the wedding we have our details the finer details of our wedding so you want to select all of these make them subtask and then the final couple of items here the wedding venue and then finally we have honeymoon like so so now you can see how the summary and subtasks add a bit of structure to our project plan and if we want to hone in on specific tasks we have the collapsible and expandable menus which allow us to focus just on what we're interested in the final thing to note here is the start and end dates notice that those haven't changed they're still showing as the 2nd of January 2023 and that is because throughout all of these changes that we've made we still have an added durations to our tasks and that's exactly what we're going to start doing in the next lesson at this stage our project plan is really starting to take shape we have our basic structure all in place and we have some of the task details filled in but as I mentioned currently we haven't added any durations to any of these tasks and so our start and finish dates are still on the same day the 2nd of January now my end goal here is that by the time I've entered in all of these durations for these different tasks I'll be able to solidify a date to have the wedding because everything in this project plan needs to be done prior to the wedding day taking place and if we notice at the bottom of this project plan the last task in this list is the actual wedding day so really we want everything to be complete before task 44 where we have the rehearsal and Then followed by the wedding day now we're not really going to have an idea as to when this wedding day can happen until we've added in durations for all of these other tasks now it might be when you first begin a project you have absolutely no idea how long these things are going to take so projects in general can be something that's very flexible very movable and you can update durations as you go just bear in mind that when you do update durations for different tasks it is going to change your finished day in some instances so in general when I'm working on a project what I tend to do is I tend to put in a tentative duration I have a rough guess at how long a task is going to take me and then when I have more of an idea later on I go back in and I make my adjustments now it might be that you have very fixed durations that you're working with depending on the project plan that you're doing if you do then you can put those into your project plan now I'm going to do a few of these so you can see how this affects your overall project and I think it's worth at this stage pointing out that we have other views that we can use to help us with this aside from the grid View you that we're currently looking at if you recall right at the beginning I showed you that there were four different ways that we can view the tasks in our project now grid view the view that we're currently in is a great view to work in when you're inputting pieces of information into each task but we also have board view up here which gives us more of a planner style way of viewing each of our tasks our tasks are shown in cards and we can organize them into different buckets now I'm not going to linger too much on that at the moment we're going to come back to that a bit later on the thing I really want to show you here is the timeline view more commonly known as Gantt chart view now currently my Gantt chart view is pretty empty if I scroll across I haven't got anything in there and again this is because I haven't added any durations for any of my tasks as soon as I start adding task durations I'm going to see them displayed in bars running across this timeline so let's start out by adding in something for agree budget and approach now you don't necessarily have to go back to grid View and then add in the duration from here you can work from timeline view if you want to you could click on the I to open up the task details and you can enter the duration in here you can even enter individual start and finish times for this particular task now a green budget and approach let's say that this is going to take us seven days now when you're entering in durations you can simply type seven D for Days 7 W for weeks seven H for hours so on and so forth so I'm going to say that this is going to take seven days let's press the Tab Key and you can see that it inputs the start and finish dates for me so it's working off the fact that this task is going to start on the day that the project starts which is the 2nd of January 2023 and because the duration is seven days it's going to finish on the 10th of January 2023 now remember when you are working in project for the web it uses a standard default calendar so what you're going to see here is basically working time so it doesn't include weekends let's click on close and now if we scroll across you can see that we have something in our timeline and that is the agree budget and approach I can see how long that's going to take so seven days from the second to the 10th and that seven days doesn't include the weekend so if you actually count January the 2nd to the 6th and then we add on the 9th and the 10th that is your seven days and we can adjust durations of our tasks simply by dragging the bar in or dragging the bar out so timeline view can be a really nice visual way of organizing your tasks sometimes it's a lot easier to get an overall vision of your project doing it this way as opposed to going to the grid View and manually inputting durations into here let's jump back to timeline view now another thing to note about this view is that we have a zoom slider at the top so I'm currently zoomed all the way out now I'm going to zoom all the way in and then scroll across to find my item now notice just above there where we have our first task in the duration notice where we have the wedding plan task which isn't effectively a task it's a summary task we have this blue line so this is basically going to show me the entire length of the project so I can see currently my project runs from the 2nd of January to the 10th of January I can also see those start and finish times reflected just underneath where we have the title now let's add something else setting the wedding day let's click on the I well setting the wedding day is only going to take one day once we know what it is it's going to take us one day to set that wedding date let's press Tab and you can see that that's now been added now notice that both of these tasks start on the same day January the 2nd but it's very doubtful I would start thinking about budgeting approach and set the wedding day on the same day so this might be a task that I want to move until after now if I want to move this I can simply click on it grab it drag it along and place it where I need it to be this task occurs on January the 11th and it finishes on January the 11th notice that the end date of my entire project has now updated from the 10th of January to the 11th of January and I would simply carry on going through adding task durations in this way as I said you can work from this view this is my preferred way to do it or you can do it directly from grid View and start adding your durations into here now in general when I'm adding in these durations I don't add in durations for any of the summary tasks because those will automatically update when we start adding in durations for the actual subtasks that we need to complete so if we take a look at select wedding dress well this is definitely going to happen after we've agreed the budget and the approach because maybe the approach we're going to take is to have some kind of theme and I want to bear that in mind when I'm selecting a wedding dress so let's click on the I now let's add the duration how long is it going to take me to select a wedding dress well that might take a while so I'm going to allow myself 14 days to select a wedding dress let's press tab click on close and of course it's going to add in at the start date of the project now I can move this so let's move this to after we agree the budget and approach so I'm going to set this to the 11th of January now because this is a 14 day task you can see that that has pushed out the overall finish day of my project to the 30th of January and notice above all of the summary tasks have now updated to reflect the duration of all of the tasks below them let's do one more and then I'll leave you to fill in the rest yourself and again I don't mind what durations you use or anything like that let's complete one more let's complete the order dress task now this is going to occur after I've selected my wedding dress so I'm going to click on the I this one ends on the 30th of January so so the duration for ordering the dress well it's only going to take me one day to order it I just need to make a phone call so let's put in one day and once again I'm going to move this now notice that I'm entering in the duration and then I'm going in and moving the task you don't have to do it that way you could add in your start and finish dates up here if you wanted to I just find it a bit easier to do by dragging and dropping items on the timeline so let's close this down I'm going to grab this item and we're going to move it to the 31st of January once again you can see the Finish date of this project has now updated now I'm going to go through and I'm going to add durations for each of the tasks in this project plan now all of the durations that I'm going to use you're going to find in another Excel spreadsheet that's saved off to the course files folder and it's called final wedding plan complete and in here you'll find all of the information for all of the tasks so for this particular lesson you can focus on the duration column and you can add in the same durations as I have so I'm going to go away and do all of that and I'll join you in the next lesson so I've been through every single task in my project plan and I've added in a duration for each task and you can see in timeline view exactly how my project is shaping up and if we scroll all the way to the top and take a look at this first wedding plan summary task if I hover my mouse over it it's showing me the entire duration of this project so I start planning this wedding on the 2nd of January 2023 and the last task finishes on the 26th of May 2023 also notice that that start and finish time has updated underneath the final wedding plan heading so if I scroll all the way down to the bottom and take a look at the wedding day task now if we scroll through the Gantt chart you can see that the wedding day currently is set to occur on May the 26th by that point everything should be done and everything should be booked now notice here I have a big old gap between the rehearsal and The Wedding Date because in general I'll have my rehearsal and then there'll be 10 days or so before we actually have the wedding so now that I've determined what my wedding day is going to be I can go back to one of the first tasks that we have in our project plan and that is set wedding day so this effectively is now complete and that's exactly what I want to talk to you about in this lesson how you can update the progress and also complete tasks now for this we're going to switch back to grid view so that we can see our tasks in a big long list now task number three here is to set the wedding date and as I said we now have more of an idea as to when that wedding date is going to be now of course that wedding date might rely on other things I might then have to go to the venues and make sure they're available on that day and that is where we would start adding in things like dependencies but for now for the case of this example let's just pretend that that is our wedding date that's set in stone and this task task number three is now complete so in order to complete tasks or even just update their progress there's a few different ways that you can do this for example if I click on the I that is going to open the details of this particular task and in here I can choose if this task is complete or I can set the percentage of completion notice here we have a complete field I can use these scrollers up and down which will toggle me 25 at a time so I could say that this is 25 complete now if I was to say that let's close this down you can see immediately in the percentage complete column that has now updated now another way that I can update this percentage is simply to type into this field so if I double click in here I can change it to whatever I like so if I don't want it to be 25 50 75 100 I could type in something else I could say 60. and that's going to show as 60 complete now if I want to mark this as a hundred percent complete I can either double click change it to 100 I can open up the task details Pane and change the completion percentage to 100 from here or alternatively I can click on the circle next to the task so in between the task number and the task name we have this little circle if I hover over it says Mark task as complete so as soon as I do that you can see that we now get a strike through through this task to show me that it's complete the percentage complete column changes to a hundred percent and also check out what has happened to the overall wedding plan summary task I can see here that now it's showing me that this task is one percent complete so I've completed one percent of my entire project I'm also going to complete the task above so let's pretend that we've agreed the budget and the approach we set that to a hundred percent and now you can see the percentage complete at the wedding plan is four percent in total so as each of these tasks are completed yourself or any other member who has access to this project plan can come in and can update the progress of a specific task I'm going to go down to another task let's double click here and I'm going to say that this is 50 complete and let's say that this task is 25 percent complete and you can see every time I update this progress how that reflects in the overall completion percentage for the project and this is exactly why I like having this type of task as the first task in my project because I get a lot more visibility as to how far along the entire project is now let's take a look at how this affects some of the other views that we have here so if we jump across to board view which we haven't really taken a great deal of a look at at the moment you can see that currently I just have bucket one at the top and all of my tasks are currently located in bucket one but if I scroll all the way down to the end notice that I have a completed section just here and when I click on this it's going to show me the tasks that have actually been completed so they don't disappear once you've completed them you can still see them if you need to refer back to them and of course if you decide that you want to put that back into the project you can simply deselect the tick and it will mark this task as incomplete and move it back to the task list another thing we can do is we can use our filters in the top right hand corner to filter on the progress of specific tasks so if I want to see all of the tasks that are currently in progress so this is going to be any tasks that have a percentage greater than zero percent but less than a hundred percent those are going to show in here if I go back to filters and progress again I could also filter for all of the tasks that are complete if I just want to see those so using filters is a great way of refining what you're looking at but that's it it's very straightforward to update the progress on your tasks in a project plan Simon Says subscribe and click on the Bell icon to receive notifications we can add additional information into each task by adding notes attachments and checklist items and if you take a look at our project plan at the moment you can see that the second column along is that quick look column and I briefly mentioned this quick look column a bit earlier on in the course notice that I have this little note icon so this is going to allow me to quickly jump to the details of the task and view any notes now I haven't added any notes into any of my tasks as yet but notice in the details pane right at the top we have a section here to add a note for example if we go down to task number three set wedding date now this task I actually completed in the last lesson but let's add a note anyway I'm going to click on the I what I can do here is add a note to let everybody know that the wedding date needs to be in the summer or the Autumn because this could be helpful when we're scheduling the durations of other tasks and fortunately if we take a look at the Finish day of our project plan you can see that yes our wedding date is going to be towards the end of May which Falls within the parameters of summer so very simple and straightforward to add notes to any of the tasks something else we can do here is we can also add any attachments so if you have some further information stored off in maybe a Word document or a PDF file or maybe even something like an Excel spreadsheet then you can definitely attach those to your tasks as well so for example if we scroll down to measurements and fitting in the entire section task number nine and click on the I to open the details pane if we scroll all the way down to the bottom notice we have an add attachment button so if I click on add attachment I can add an attachment that's saved off to my computer I can add an attachment from my team's files this is where we get that great Microsoft 365 interaction if you've uploaded a file into a team's Channel you could select to upload that from here we could also link directly to a URL so maybe there is a website that we want to link to we can add that just there so let's start out by uploading a file from our computer and you'll find the files that I'm going to upload saved off into the course files folder if you want to replicate what I'm doing so I have a few files in here and this is the one I am looking for bridesmaid dress sizes so it's just a table that lists out all of the dress sizes and all of the measurements for the Bridesmaids which is going to be really important when we're selecting dresses this is saved off into a Word document let's click on open you can see that that file is now uploading and also note the file location any file you upload into project for the web is effectively going to be uploaded into your SharePoint library now as soon as that file has been uploaded take a look at the task in the project plan grid view you can see that I now have an indicator this little paperclip icon with a one next to it that lets me know that this particular task has a file attached if I was to attach another one this indicator would change to a number two now let's jump back into add attachment and this time we're going to add a link to a URL so this is basically where you can copy and paste in a link to a website and I actually already have one saved off to my clipboard so I'm just going to do Ctrl V to paste that in and then I can choose a more meaningful name to display this link as so I'm going to say bridesmaid dresses let's click on ADD and you can see that that's added that just there as well notice that the indicator icon has now increased to two because effectively we have two different attachments so you can basically attach any type of file or add a link to a URL on a website into any of your tasks which is really useful so let's close that pane down now another thing that you might want to add into your tasks are checklist items and this is very similar to adding checklist items or subtasks in planner so if I go to task number seven where we have select wedding dress I'm going to click on the I to open the details Pane and notice halfway down we have a little checklist area so this is where we can add checklist items because remember a task mine also have numerous subtasks as part of it so whilst the overall task here is Select wedding dress there might be numerous different to do items within that particular task for example maybe I need to decide on the color do I want cream do I want white do I want Ivory or do I want a completely different color maybe I need to do some re research and look at different websites maybe I need to visit some stores and have a browse through to get some ideas so these can all be added as mini tasks within this task and we call these checklist items so we can simply click just here and add our first one decide on dress color press enter to add the next one research dress styles and let's add one more visit local dress shops again notice what's happening in this quick look column next to this task it's now showing that I have checklist items and it says 0 of 3 because currently none of them are completed as I check off these different items so maybe I've decided on the dress color that I want if I click the circle next to it to mark it as complete you can see that that now updates to show me that one out of three checklist items have been completed so I'm going to go through and complete all of these and you can now see three of three checklist items have been completed so all three of these things here notes attachments and checklist items are a really great way of adding in additional information to your tasks to organize our tasks more effectively we can use buckets to group our tasks and again this is something that we took a look at when we were working with planner you can probably see now there is quite a lot of crossover between using the planner app and using project for the web now take a look across our column headings you'll notice that one of the column headings we have here is bucket and currently every single task aside from the summary tasks is assigned to bucket1 and that's because that is the default bucket that gets created when we create a project now where can we see all of our buckets well we need to switch across to board view because this is where we're going to see all of our tasks listed out in card views and currently all of our tasks in our project plan are simply contained in bucket one and this will be the case if you don't create other buckets and move tasks to different buckets everything's just going to be in the default bucket so what you can do here is you can use the add bucket button at the top to create your own custom buckets to organize your tasks a little bit more effectively for example maybe we want to have a bucket that says not started another bucket that says work in progress another bucket that says completed or maybe we just want a bucket for phase one a bucket for phase two a bucket for phase three or in this case maybe I want different buckets to denote different stages of the project so maybe I want a bucket called preparation maybe I want another bucket called planning and then maybe I want a final bucket called implementation so let's first change the name of bucket one because that's not particularly meaningful I'm going to click on the three dots to open up more options and there is the rename button so I'm going to call this first bucket let's call it preparation phase and hit enter now also notice when we hover over this we have this little Color Picker tool so once again I can change the color of these buckets just to make it stand out a little bit more so let's make this one purple I can then click add bucket and this one is going to be the planning phase and once again let's pick a color this one's going to be blue and I'm going to add a third and final bucket [Music] implementation phase and let's give this a nice green color now what I can do is I can move my tasks across by dragging and dropping into these different buckets in order to organize them so the wedding day that's going to be in the implementation phase I can simply drag and drop the rehearsal is going to be in the implementation phase as well drag and drop select honeymoon destination that's implementation making the honeymoon destination shortlist well that really comes under planning booking the wedding venue is going to be an implementation making wedding venue shortlist is going to be in planning so I can carry on moving my tasks around into these different buckets now another way that we can do this is if we switch back to grid view take a look at the bucket column now you can see that it's updated with the new names of the buckets and now if I click the drop down I have the different buckets listed in here so I can assign different tasks in this way as well so the top two tasks are going to be the preparation phase most of these other ones here are going to be in the planning phase so this will be planning ordering the dress well that's going to be implementation measurements and fitting that's planning this one's going to be implementation so on and so forth so I would carry on going through assigning these to different buckets so I'm going to go through this entire project plan I'm going to assign them to the correct bucket so join me back here in a couple of moments so I've now assigned all of my tasks to their relevant buckets and you can see that in the preparation phase I simply have those two completed tasks setting the wedding day and agreeing the budget and approach everything else either comes under the planning phase or the implementation phase and as I said if we go back to the grid view this is now reflected in the overall project plan now the reason why you might want to use buckets to group your tasks is because it adds a little bit of organization to a big long task list it makes it easier for us to see what tasks are part of different phases of the project and it also means that we can search a lot easier for different buckets and tasks so for example if we click on the filters button at the top we have a filter for buckets so if I click the drop down there are my different buckets and if I just want to see all of the tasks that are part of the planning phase I can filter by that and it's just going to show me those tasks once again if I scroll back up to the top I can clear all to clear that filter it's also worth noting that if you're working in timeline view I know a lot of people do love working in timeline view let's just scroll across so we can see a project we also have filters in here so if you want to use that bucket filter whilst you're looking at timeline view you can definitely do that as well so let's take a look at the planning phase again and once again it's just going to update in the timeline view and we can get an overview of the durations of each of these tasks a popular thing that people like to do when they're working in Project is add task dependencies so what do we mean by that well you'll find that there are certain tasks throughout your project that rely on another task finishing before that task can start so a good example of that would be if we go down to the attire section in our final wedding plan I can't order the wedding dress until I've selected the wedding dress so effectively task 8 relies on task 7 finishing before this one can start and that is what we call a dependency and I have lots of things like that throughout this project plan for example I can't send out the invitations to my guests until I know who I'm sending them to so I need to make make guestlist a dependent of send out invitations so how do we create task dependencies well let's scroll back up to order dress let's click on the I to open the task details and if we scroll down towards the bottom notice we have a depends on area so it says this task doesn't depend on other tasks so it's basically telling me currently I don't have any dependencies for this task so let's add one it's going to pop open a list of suggested tasks that I might want to add as a dependency and would you take a look at that it's popped up task number seven select wedding dress so I'm going to add that as a dependency notice underneath I also have a search for tasks area so if I want to find a specific task that needs to be a dependent of this one I can type it in and then it's going to pop up above for me to select so now that we've added this dependency let's close down this Pane and take a look at how that reflects in our project plan well if we jump across to timeline view and once again we need to scroll across check out what we have here we have this squiggly line and you can see that that line is linking task 7 to task 8. so this is showing me that task 7 is a dependency of task number eight so this is actually another way that you can create dependencies you can do it directly from timeline view simply by dragging to link tasks together so let's scroll down to make guest list and send out invitations so here we can see that send out invitations relies on us having a guest list so task number 15 is dependent on task number 14 completing so what we can do here is we can create a dependency simply by dragging this little circle so if I hover over send out invitations I'm going to click on this circle and I'm going to drag and drop it to the task above and that creates that link that dependency now there is a third way that we can do this as well so let's jump back to grid View what we can do is we can add another column into our project plan so let's scroll across and click on ADD column now notice we have two fields we could add here dependence after and depends on so I'm going to add both of these so you can see the difference dependence after and depends on now notice here what I'm getting in these different columns for the tasks that we've actually linked so you can see here depends after we have task number eight order dress and task number seven is Select wedding dress so this is the dependent after that task whereas this one is showing me what this task depends on so task number eight ordering the wedding dress depends on us selecting the wedding dress first and if I want to add dependents in I can add them in using this view as well so let's scroll back and take a look at something else that has dependence so before I can book the reception venue I need to know which reception venue I'm booking so I need to make sure I've made my short list and decided so effectively task 20 is dependent on task 19. so if we select task 20 to make it easy for us to find as we scroll across and go to the depends on column what I can do is click in here and it's going to pull up a list of suggested tasks now if the one that I want to link to isn't in this particular list you can just type in the task number into here now the one that I want is there task number 19 make reception venue shortlist so I can simply select it in order to create that dependency this also updates and reflects in our timeline view so if we jump back across and scroll all the way down to the reception venue section let's just pull this out so we can see this you can see that there is that dependency link it's automatically been created when we added the task number into the depends on column in Grid View and the cool thing about these dependency links is that if I was to move this task so let's just grab this one and if I was to move this out the dependency link is going to move with it another way that we can organize add tasks when working in project for the web is that we can assign labels to tasks and labels are a nice visual way of seeing which tasks belong to which category and of course we can also use those labels to filter add tasks so we can see just what we're interested in so let's start by going into a task so once again we're going to use select wedding dress let's click on the I to open those task details now right at the top here you can see that we have an option to add a label and if I click in here I'm simply going to get the default labels available in project for the web but of course all of these are customizable so you can make them a little bit more meaningful to your project so I've been using pastely colors quite a lot in this session already so let's stick with this theme I'm going to click on the pencil icon next to where it says pink to edit the label name and this is where you can add your own label now name so these can be whatever you like I'm just going to create some simple ones that I can visually see tasks which haven't started task that in progress and tasks that are complete so my first label is going to be not started and press enter to set let's go to the next one and I'm going to call this work in progress or whip let's go to the next one and we're going to name this complete and hit enter so now I can simply click and I can add the relevant label so let's say work in progress for this one here let's close that down and of course if we want to see that indicated in our grid view we can add a column that specifically shows the label of those individual tasks now I've got quite a few columns going on here and I am going to tidy this up a little bit in the next lesson because I think I've got some here which I don't really need so what I'm going to do is I'm going to scroll out because I have my view set to quite large so I have a scroll wheel on my mouse I'm going to hold down control and I'm just going to use that to scroll out a little bit so we get a better view of our entire project plan so let's add another column on the end notice we have one for labels let's click to add and you can see here I have plus one so this is the label that I've just added to the task but it's just showing us a little plus one icon now what we can do instead is click the labels drop down just here and toggle off show titles because that's simply just going to show the color of this icon and for me that looks a little bit better so I can go through adding my different labels so let's choose not started for this one I can go to the next one that one's also not started so on and so forth and if I go up to my top two tasks so these ones up here agree budget and approach and also set wedding date if I scroll across both of these are complete so I can click in the labels column and I'm going to set both of those to complete so really nice and simple to add those labels and of course we have a filters button at the top here and we have a label section so this way I can now filter for let's say all of the tasks where I've added the complete label so labels are really just another way of categorizing your tasks using color as we've been working through building this project plan we've been adding lots of different columns in order to demonstrate the different types of things that you can do in project for the web so what I've ended up with here is a project that kind of has too many columns there's too much information on here then I really need to see I want to try and keep things as simple as possible while still having access to the key information that's important to me so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and I'm going to review each column to see if it's really necessary do I need to see it in this view or can I remove it so let's start out with the First Column quick look well yes this is a column that's pretty useful it shows me if I have attachments and also checklist items so let's keep that column the priority is also an extremely useful column as is assigned to and duration now what about the bucket column do I need to see the buckets well if I want to see which bucket these tasks are assigned to I could switch across to board view because I have my buckets listed out there so what I'm going to do to save a bit of space is I'm going to click the drop down next to where it says bucket and I'm going to choose hide column I'm going to keep percentage Complete because that's pretty helpful what about team well that's not particularly too useful I've found that I haven't really looked too much at this team column I'm more likely to look at who the task is assigned to so once again I'm going to click the drop down and I'm going to choose to hide this column now notice here when I click the drop down next to team I get hide column and also edit when I click the drop down next to Buckhead I only had the option to hide the column and that's because team is a custom column that I added myself so in addition to hiding the column I could also choose the edit button and I could delete the entire field so deleting the field will actually get rid of the field whereas when you hide you can simply add it back in again by clicking on the add column button and choosing it from here because these are the default standards that are built into project for the web so if I wanted to pull that bucket column back again I would simply need to select it from this list now what about this mandatory column is this task mandatory yes or no well pretty much all of these tasks are mandatory it's a wedding plan we can't really skip over any of these so let's click the drop down because this field isn't giving me too much information let's click on edit and I'm going to delete this field again this was a custom field that I added what about location well yes that's going to be quite useful to know where these different tasks are taking place we then have dependents after and depends on now I tend to use the depends on column a little bit more than depends after so I'm going to Simply hide this column remember because this is an inbuilt column in project for the web I only get the option to hide the column so I'm going to get rid of that one I'm going to leave depends on do I want my labels column just here well you know what just to save a little bit of space I'm going to hide that column as well so now I can zoom out a little bit make this a little bit bigger and I can see all of my information without having to scroll horizontally across the bottom in the last lesson I went through and just tied it up and removed some of the columns that I don't really use and since the last lesson I've made a couple of other changes I've been through the entire project plan and I've assigned all of these tasks to the correct people and I've also changed the color of the locations in the location column just to make them look a little bit more professional now what we're going to do in this lesson is we're going to add another couple of columns of information and one in particular I'm going to show you how you can utilize emojis in your columns to provide a visual indicator as to the status of each task so the first thing I'm going to do here is we're going to click on ADD column and I'm going to add one of these preset columns because it's going to actually be quite useful for me to be able to see the date that each of these tasks start so let's add in start and I'm going to move this column all the way over to the beginning so let's grab it and let's drag it across and I'm going to put it right at the beginning before the quick look column so now I've got a good idea as to when each of these tasks are starting what I also might want to add in here is the Finish date as well so once again let's add that and let's drag it across and put in our finish dates so these themselves are extremely useful pieces of information now something else I might want to add and this is really just an exercise to show you the capabilities the types of things that you can do in Project 4 the web that you may not have thought of previously now what I want to do here is I want to have a column on the end here called status where I have kind of like a traffic light indicator so red might indicate something like alert yellow is okay and green is good and of course you can customize these to suit your particular project so let's take a look at how we might do something like that so if we click on ADD column we're going to create a custom column so let's go for New Field now the type of column that I'm going to add is going to be a choice because I want them to be able to select one of three traffic lights from a drop down now we're going to call this field status and then we can add in add choices now effectively what I want here is I want Choice One to be a green indicator so basically like a green circle a green Traffic Light so how do I get an emoji into my choices well if you're using Windows this is where the touch keyboard is going to come in really handy now I'm using Windows 11 but this option should work in Windows 10 as well so if I pull my mouse down to reveal my taskbar notice that one of the icons I have here on the right hand side is touch keyboard now you may or may not have that already displayed in this little notifications area if you can't see it there if you click the little up Arrow you might find it in here in this overflow area alternatively what you can do to bring it up is right click on the taskbar go to taskbar settings and where we have taskbar Corner icons make sure you have touch keyboard toggled on once you've done that you should be able to see it down here in the corner so we can use this touch keyboard to add emojis into our choices so let's click to pull it up and this is basically like a virtual keyboard now notice in the top Corner we have this little icon here which has got a heart on it and if we click on this it's going to give us access to things like gifs stickers and emojis so let's click on emoji to open up the Emoji gallery and then I can go through and search for the emojis that I'm looking for so I can type in here Circle so the first one I want here is the green circle so let's just click to add that close our keyboard and you can see it's added it to my choices so I might want this one to say on track let's do the next one I'm going to delete out Choice two we're going to click on a touch keyboard jump to our emojis we're going to search for Circle again this time we're going to have a orange circle and I'm just gonna put needs attention again you can type in whatever you like here and the final one is our choice three so let's pull up our virtual keyboard again and we're going to repeat this process now I have the one that I want saved off into my favorite so I'm just going to choose the red circle from here let's close this down and we'll just say behind schedule and let's click on create so now the end here we have this status column and I can go through and those are now my options so I can say on track for this one on track just here maybe this one needs attention and it's just a really nice way of visually being able to see which tasks are on track and which ones you maybe need to go back and take a look at now it's worth bearing in mind that these aren't conditional or automated in any way shape or form so these aren't linked in any way to update depending on other things that change for example if I was to Mark a task 100 complete before its due date it's not going to update its status to on track these are just there in case you want to keep them up to date as a really nice way of just being able to visually see very quickly which tasks are behind schedule and really what I wanted to show you here is the potential you don't just have to add in things like text you can use things like emojis traffic-like systems different colors in order to indicate different things within your project so I'm sure that you can think of lots of creative ways to use the touch keyboard and the Emoji Gallery in order to really make your project plans come to life one of the biggest advantages to using project for the web is that it exists within the Microsoft 365 universe so it makes it really easy to integrate with other Microsoft 365 applications like SharePoint OneNote and teams and in this lesson I just want to speak a little bit more about groups and members now if you cast your mind all the way back to the beginning of this section I showed you how to create a project plan from scratch we created the final wedding plan and I showed you how you can add group members and we can see all of those group members at the top here if we click on the group members link it's showing me that we have a group final wedding plan it's a private group and then I can see all of the members of this group now everybody in this group has access to this project plan now I'm the owner of this project plan I'm the one who created it and when I added other people to this group I essentially shared this project with them so let's just imagine for a moment that I'm Ben Lee and I'm logging into my version of project for the web when I get to the home screen I'm going to be able to find the final wedding plan under the shared with me link from here we can simply open it much the same way as we would from recent and we can go in and start making our changes so all of the members of this group have access to make changes to this project plan now what about if I want to add somebody external to this project plan as a member can I do that from within project for the web well let's take a look I have a little field here that says enter names to add members so I'm going to attempt to add somebody external so let's add my friend Jen who has a Gmail email address now take a look at that it won't let me add up it says no results found it doesn't matter if I hit enter or whatever I do it's not going to add her to this project now there is a way that you can add external people to a project but you don't do it from within project for the web you do it from within Outlook groups and that's effectively what you're doing here so when you add members to a particular project you create a group in Outlook and we can use that group to add new members and interact with other group members now you might be familiar with Outlook groups or Microsoft 365 groups as new groups are created if you create a new team in Microsoft teams or if you create a new site in SharePoint so let's jump across to Outlook and see if we can find this final wedding plan group well would you take a look at that if we cast our eyes over to the left hand side of the screen so at the bottom of my inbox I have a lot of collapsible and expandable folder called groups and in here I can see all of the Microsoft 365 groups that I have access to now bear in mind I haven't created any of these myself they've been created automatically when I've been doing other things in other Microsoft 365 applications for example when I created a SharePoint site for SharePoint online training it automatically created an Outlook group for me and you can see that one of the groups I now have is final wedding plan and I can do lots of things with the group members from here if you take a look at the home ribbon in the middle here we have a group that says final wedding plan so I can send emails from this particular group I can take a look at our group calendar we can view group files Within sharepoints These would be any files that I've maybe attached to tasks in Project we can even create a group notebook so this is quite a good one if we click on the notebook icon it's going to open up OneNote online and automatically we have a final wedding plan notebook created for us that is now shared with all group members if we want to have lots and lots of notes about the different tasks and the overall wedding plan we can add those into there and it's really easy for everybody else to be able to view them and another thing we have in here is group settings so from here I can leave the group I can edit the group I can invite others or I can add members so if I wanted to add Jen I could choose add members and you can see at the top here it says add colleagues Microsoft 365 groups distribution lists or guests so if the person that you're adding doesn't have a Microsoft 365 account then they would be considered to be guests so I've typed in Jen's email address again this time I can select her and you can see it's added her as a member but Jen is simply a guest and the difference between guests and members is that guests have limited access to group resources so guests can't do as much within the project plan as members can let's click on OK and jump back to project so now if I refresh the browser we should find that our group members increase from five to six and I can see yes they have if I click this I can see there is Jen right at the bottom now of course the ability for members whether they be internal external to edit projects in project for the web also relies on if they have a license for project for the web so just bear that in mind as well if you're trying to add somebody who hasn't purchased project for the web then you're going to run into some issues now a couple of other things that we can do in here with regards to sharing tasks and projects is that we can copy links to specific tasks for example if I hover over the select wedding dress task and click on the three dots you can see that one of the options I have in here is to copy a link to the task so I can basically copy this link and then maybe open up an email or maybe even something like a teams Channel and then paste that in so if I jump across very quickly to Microsoft teams and I'm just going to choose any of these channels let's just go for the general Channel and start a new conversation when I do control V it's going to paste that task Link in and I can send that through to the team's Channel and then team members can click on that link and it's going to jump them across to project now you can see there when I click on it it asks me to confirm my email address and it's linked me directly to that particular task so I can now see everything that's going on here and I can make my updates and my changes so really nice and straightforward now similarly we can link to entire projects as well so if we go back to the Home tab just here and take a look underneath recent where we have our final wedding plan if I click the three dots I can also copy a link to the entire project so if I was to select this the link gets copied to the clipboard I'm just going to go back to teams and paste it into here Ctrl V hit enter and then when people click on this particular link it's going to take them to the actual project plan as opposed to a specific task in this lesson we're going to talk about how we can incorporate our project plan into a channel in Microsoft teams because this is a super helpful utility and it really does showcase the Slick interaction between all of the different applications in Microsoft 365. so what I really want to do here is I want to have a teams Channel called final wedding plan where I can have conversations share files host meetings and calls with other team members but I also want them to be able to view this project plan from within the team's channel so how do we exactly set that up because if you have a little click around on all of the buttons in project for the web you're not really going to find anything which says connect to teams or share this with a team Channel now in the last lesson when we were talking about sharing I explained to you that as soon as you create a new project plan and add members it creates automatically a Microsoft 365 Group which we can view in Outlook and the good thing about teams is that we can set up a new team based off of a Microsoft 365 group so that's exactly what we're going to do now if you don't use teams and have no interest in teams then you can probably skip this lesson but if you do utilize teams this is going to be a really useful thing to know so let's first of all open up teams so I'm going to go to my applications launcher and I'm going to choose teams from my applications list this is going to open up in a brand new browser window and it's going to jump me across to my team's account and you can see here just some other teams that I have access to now underneath this teams list we have a little link that says join or create a team which basically takes you to this screen just here so I want to create a team but I want to create it based off of an existing Microsoft 365 group so let's make sure that we choose the correct option in here and take a look at that I have all of those Microsoft 365 groups that I could see in my Outlook account earlier on so let's choose final wedding plan and click on create it's going to go away and create the team and now if I take a look at my teams list there is final wedding plan and you can see by default it's created for me a general Channel where I can start having conversations so now that I have my brand new team how do I get my project plan to display for all members within teams well if we go up to the top here where we have these three tabs posts files and Wiki let's click on the plus to see what we have now this is where we can add different tabs running across the top of our Channel and you can see that we have a few different things that we could select in here now whilst you might naturally think that the tab that you want is Project just here remember that we're actually working in project for the web so we're essentially online so what I want to do here instead is go back to my final wedding plan and I'm going to copy the URL of this project plan Ctrl C let's jump back to teams and we're going to add a tab that contains a website now what I want to call my tab name well let's just say project plan and then I can paste in the URL control V I'm going to say yes post to this Channel about the new tab and click on Save now it might ask you to verify your account details so I'm quickly going to do that and would you take a look at that and it might take a few seconds to come through but you should find that it loads up your project plan in this brand new tab so that we can have conversations with our team members just here but we can also view the project plan that we're talking about and because I chose to let team members know that I've created this tab if we go back to posts you can see it's automatically posted a message from me saying I added a tab at the top of this channel check it out so that is how you can add your project plan as a tab in Microsoft teams if you're a project manager then you might find that you're responsible for numerous different projects on a daily basis and it might be that you want to keep an eye on all of your projects as a whole and specific tasks within those projects so in project for the web what we can do is we can create something called a roadmap a project roadmap allows us to connect to any projects that we have access to and we can select specific tasks within those projects to effectively monitor in more detail so let's take a look at how we would do this so we're going to jump back to the home page by clicking on the home icon in the left hand menu now currently you can see that underneath recent I have two projects the final wedding plan which is what we've been working on and also employee onboarding and if you recall that was a project that we created at the very start of this section when I was talking you through inbuilt templates so we're going to connect to both of these project plans in the project roadmap and we're going to monitor specific tasks now in order to create a road map we need to click on the new project button and select the road map button and what we basically get is something very similar to timeline view when we're working in an individual project we have our dates running across the top we have our Zoom slider so we can zoom in and zoom back out again and then we have a button at the beginning here called add row so this is where you want to go to First we're going to click on ADD row and it's going to add a row to our timeline now each row is going to represent a project that we've connected to so if you want to keep your eye on multiple different projects you can add each of them as a new row in your roadmap now we're just going to connect to two different projects now notice on the right hand side I have this details pane pop open so I need to give my row a name now of course you can change this at a later date but I'm going to call this wedding plan we need to enter an owner so I'm just going to select myself as the owner and then we need to connect to a project now we get a choice of connecting two projects or Azure boards now I'm going to connect to a project and you can see in here a big long list of all of the projects that I've created now the reason why you don't see all of these in recent in project for the web is because I've basically removed them from that list just to keep the list nice and tidy but I have in fact as I've been preparing for this session created lots of copies of the final wedding plan and also another couple of test projects down here now the only ones that we really want to add to our roadmap are the top two up here final wedding plan and employee onboarding now if I had another project maybe in Project online I could choose to manually import my project into the roadmap if I was to click this it's going to allow me to search for any projects that I have now we're going to add final wedding plan first of all and when we connect to something like a project we're basically setting up a flow and this is where it becomes very obvious that Microsoft project for the web is built on the Power Platform because flows are basically part of power automate they allow us to automate specific processes now the thing you need to watch out for here when you're trying to connect to a specific project is the little permissions at the bottom so right at the bottom here you're going to be told by project what applications it needs access to in order to connect to this specific project so it's telling me that it needs access to project roadmap and the Microsoft dataverse now I can see that I've got green ticks next to both of these which means that I have a valid connection but sometimes particularly if this is the first time you're creating a roadmap it might ask you to sign in just here so it might say sign in next to each of these applications so you really just need to validate your login credentials all you do is click on the sign in button and then you should get the green tick you might see other things in here so if there's some kind of error you might see an error just here but all of them will be clickable links so you can delve a bit deeper into why you're getting an error now I can see that I've got a valid connection so I can click on connect at the bottom to connect to this project so it's now connected to my final wedding plan and it's opened up all of the tasks that are part of this plan so now I just need to go through and select the tasks that I'm interested in and notice here at the top I have a quick select option so I can choose to select all Milestones or summary tasks or top level tasks so let's say all summary tasks so now if I close this pane down you can see it says 12 connected row items if I then wanted to add more items in I could go to update items and make further selections but I'm going to close both of these down and I should find that if I scroll across to where my project starts I can see those items listed just here so I'm getting that Gantt chart that timeline view of just the tasks that I've selected now if I click on these bars I get some further options so we show me the start and the end date and I can set a status so I can choose not set on track at risk high risk so I'm going to say that this one is on track and it hopefully color codes it for me so it's really easy to see let's choose this one well this one is at risk I haven't selected a wedding dress yet so I could carry on going through color coding these key items what I could also do is I could add a key date into this roadmap so what is my key date here well the wedding day is a pretty key date and I think the wedding day is on the 26th of May 2023 so let's set that as a key date so I'm going to choose that and we're going to say on track add key date and you can see there it puts that pin into the roadmap so I can add as many of these key dates to keep an eye on different markers throughout my project let's add another row and I'm going to add the other project so this was onboarding the owner again is going to be myself we're going to connect to a project and we're going to connect to employee onboarding once again this is going to create a flow check to make sure that you have green ticks next to the apps that it needs access to and then click on connect once again I can go through and select tasks manually by clicking in the box or I can utilize my quick select and I'm going to say select all top level tasks this time let's scroll down and I'm going to choose update and now you can see it says five connected row items let's click on close and this project starts a lot sooner than the wedding plans if I scroll all the way back I can see those key top level tasks and once again I can click on them I can set the status I can add key dates so on and so forth if I want to go back into either of these if I just click on the title it's going to open up that Pane and I can go to update items to select more items to add in if I want to remove the project I can choose remove row just here a couple of other things before we leave this lesson I can reorder these projects so if I want wedding plan at the top I can select it and then I can use the move up button just to change the order of these items and the final thing I would probably do here is give my roadmap a title so I'm going to say I'm just going to call this Deb's projects also note in this area this is where we can also delete the entire roadmap if we need to so let's close that down go back to the home screen and now you can see there I have my roadmap so what I might do here is Mark this as a favor so that I've always got it up here easy to access the final thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to add the roadmap into the Microsoft teams Channel so once again we're going to click the three dots where we have our roadmaps and I'm going to say copy roadmap link now if we go back to teams and click on Final wedding plan we're going to do this in exactly the same way as we did when we were adding the project plan let's click on the plus and we're going to add a website so this is going to be called roadmap and I'm just going to control V to paste that URL in let's click on Save once again I just need to verify my identity which I'm going to do very quickly and after a few seconds we should find that that project roadmap loads into the teams tab in the final lesson of this section I just want to quickly run through some additional or extra features that we haven't yet covered and these are all very small features that don't really necessitate an entire lesson dedicated to them nevertheless they are very important so we're going to run through four extra features things you should know and the first thing we're going to talk about is the critical path now if you are a project user then you are probably going to understand what the critical path is the critical path is basically the tasks within a project that have the potential to severely impact the time scales that you've set for your project and if you've used an application like Project online then you're probably very used to taking a look at the critical path and viewing those tasks now the good news is we can also view the critical path within project for the web so if you really do want to have a quick look at the key tasks in our project the critical tasks we can choose to show the critical path now take a look I am currently in the employee onboarding project this is the one that we created from the template and I want to take a look at the critical path so the critical tasks that have the potential to affect the time scales of this project now in order to view the critical path you need to make sure that you're in timeline view for your project I'm just going to use my horizontal scroll so I can see the project in question now we're going to find our critical path option underneath filters just here and you can see right at the top we have a little toggle that says show critical path so if I slide to toggle this on you can see those tasks that are critical in this project they're highlighted in red another thing that we could do here if we turn off the critical path is we have a little filter for critical path as well so if we expand this I can choose to filter and show only those tasks that are critical to this project so don't forget where that is you must be in timeline view if you're working in Grid View and you go to your filters you're not going to see that show critical path slider the next additional feature that might be of interest to you is exporting your project plan out to excel so maybe you want to take all of the information that you have in your project plan dump it into an Excel spreadsheet so that you can perform further analysis maybe you want to create some kind of pivot table or maybe a chart to show the stats to your CEO or key stakeholders well the good news is that is very easy to do in project for the web now I'm back in my wedding plan and if I wanted to export all of this information out to an Excel spreadsheet I simply need to go all the way over to the right hand side where we have more actions and I have an option here export to excel let's click on it it's going to download the file to my downloads folder I'm going to choose open file and it's going to open that up in an Excel spreadsheet so I have the basic information about my project at the top so some nice overview stats and then I basically have all of that information so I have the task number the name the status the start and finish times so on and so forth and I could tidy up this information maybe reduce it down a bit and start creating some really nice pivot tables and pivot charts so export to excel is always a good one it's also worth noting that if you click back on the Home tab you also have that option available on the home screen just here you can choose to export to excel this way now what about if you just simply want to delete your project how do we do that well for this we need to click on the final wedding plan at the top here the title and once we've opened up the project details if we click on the three dots at the top that is where you're going to find the delete project button and that is pretty much going to delete everything so I will say proceed with caution with that one and then the final thing we're going to take a look at are just some of the basic settings so if we cast our eyes all the way up to the top in the right hand corner notice we have a little Cog icon just here that's going to open up the settings that we have for project for the web and I will say that these are fairly minimal now one that you might want to check out is the notification settings just here again we don't have a great deal in here but there are a couple of things that you might want to review So currently project is going to send me a notification when someone assigns a task to me I'm also going to receive a notification when someone adds me to a project or roadmap now I'm happy with both of those so I'm going to leave them on but you could toggle both of these off if you want to cut down the amount of notifications you're receiving from project for the web another thing we can do here is we can change the theme that we're using so if you don't particularly like this standard green you could change this to something completely different from here as well and then right at the bottom we just have options to change our language change our password and update add contact preferences so not a great deal of settings there but worth knowing where they are in this exercise we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section on project for the web so the first thing I'd like you to do is just make sure that you've downloaded the file product underscore launch.xlsx from the course files folder I then like you to open up project for the web and create a brand new project plan and I'd like you to First add a custom column called team and create a drop down list containing the team names development product and training once you've done that I'd like you to use the information in the spreadsheet and add the tasks once you have all of the tasks into the project plan I'd like you just to delete or remove any unused columns I'd then like you to ensure that the structure of the project plan is implemented as per the legend in the spreadsheet so what I mean by that is make sure that you have the relevance summary and sub tasks I'd also like you to ensure that the relevant buckets dependencies and other items are assigned to the tasks and the last part of this exercise is optional so if possible I'd like you to add the project plan to A team's channel so quite a few different things to do there see how you get on with that and if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing I'm going to do here is I am going to launch project for the web and I asked you to create a brand new project plan so we're going to select blank project from here now we're going to give our project a title of product launch and the first thing I asked you to do here was to add a new column named team so we're going to click on add a column and I want this column to contain a drop down list so we need to select New Field and then from here we're going to choose choice now our field is going to be called team and then we're going to have our different choices so we want product development and training and click on create I then asked you to start adding in the tasks from the product launch spreadsheet so you need to make sure that you have that file downloaded first of all and if we quickly take a look at this file you can see that we have a legend on the right hand side so this really tells you how this is going to be structured so everything in bold is a top level summary task everything in red is a second level summary task and then we have blue which are just the subtasks so let's add the First full task in here new mobile app now I'm going to split my screen to make this a bit easier let's click on add new task and type in the task name with these tasks I'm just going to assign them to myself and you can see here we have duration but in the spreadsheet it has start date and finish date so I'm quickly going to add those columns in so we're going to have start and finish and I'm going to move these so that they're just before duration and now I can fill in my times so for this one the start date is November the 2nd and the finished day is November the 16th the team that this is assigned to is the development team so I should be able to select that from the drop down and to add the rest of this information I need to go into the task detail click on the I to open up the details Pane and now we can go through and add the rest of our information so let's close this down now before I go any further adding these tasks I'm going to create my buckets so let's go across to the board view I'm going to rename the first bucket this one is going to be prep let's add another bucket this one is going to be testing add another bucket analysis and the final one deployment now when I go back to grid view I can reopen this up and This one belongs to the prep bucket and you can see there it is already so I'm just going to go through off camera and add in the rest of these tasks rejoin me when we'll create our summary and subtasks so I've added all the tasks in the task details into my project plan and it's now time to add some structure by creating summary and sub tasks so let's select task 3 4 and 5. and we're going to make these subtasks of preparation I'm now going to select preparation and we're going to make that a subtask of q1 so that is the structure that I want so let's apply that to the rest of these I'm going to select all of these tasks let's make those subtasks and then we're going to make updates and testing a subtask of Q2 let's select tasks 15 to 18 make these subtasks and then make analysis A subtask of Q3 and the final one here is we want to select all of these tasks let's make those subtasks a roll out and then make rollout a subtask of Q4 next I asked you to add dependencies so for this I'm going to add another column for depends on and I can now go through using the spreadsheet linking tasks to other tasks for example the product training task relies on tasks 3 and 4. so let's click and I'm going to select both of these remember you can select from the list or simply type in the final thing I asked you to do if possible this was optional is add this or load this into a teams Channel so let's open up Microsoft teams and I'm going to choose just one of my team channels just here let's just go for the general Channel we need to click the plus and we're going to add a website so this is going to be called campaign plan and then I just need to copy and paste the URL so let's grab it from project control C and Ctrl V to paste and click on Save and you can see that that has now loaded it into my team's Channel window so that is what I was looking for in this exercise I hope you got an okay with that I'll see you in the next section if you're not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload to get the course exercise files and follow along with this video click over there and click over there to watch more videos on YouTube from Simon says it

Channel: Simon Sez IT

Views: 109,170

Keywords: project for the web, project management, microsoft project, microsoft project tutorial, microsoft project training, learn microsoft project course, ms project, ms project tutorial, ms project videos, tutorial microsoft project, ms project training, what is ms project, ms project crash course, ms project course, gantt chart, how to use microsoft project, microsoft project web, microsoft project web version, ms project for the web, microsoft project for the web, project web

Id: XHrI5CIrFPs

Length: 155min 13sec (9313 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2022