Appendix A.70 76, Communications Lecture Notes

Appendix A.70 – 76, Communications Lecture Notes

These are my lecture notes for what I will be covering in the “hands-on” demonstration. There’s a lot more information here than in your book pages A.70 – 76. I hope these notes are of value to you.

We need a project plan file to play with. Open the software development template located on the computer. In MS Project: New, Templates… On computer, Project Templates tab, Software Development, OK.

The Copy Picture and Copy Picture to Office Wizard tools create images of the views on your screen. The key to success is getting the view on your screen setup first then execute the Copy Picture commands. I will just demonstrate the Gantt view, but you may use these features with other views as well.

Copy Picture Feature:

Display the Gantt view.

Remove the Indicators column to make more room for the Gantt chart. Steps: right-click the Indicators column, Hide Column.

Adjust the timescale on the Gantt chart as needed by zooming in/out.

Demonstrate the Copy Picture feature, button on toolbar or Report menu, Copy Picture…

• The option for screen is a standard copy/paste image.
• The printer option is similar, but the size/resolution may be different.
• The option to GIF file is good for adding to a Web page.
• Rows on screen – copies only the rows you see on your screen. Selected Rows copies the rows you have selected. Note: you have to select the rows BEFORE executing the Copy Picture command. Try both options to see the difference.
• Paste in Word or PowerPoint document.

Copy Picture to Office Wizard on Analysis Toolbar:

The wizard has more options than the Copy Picture feature such as the outline levels, entire project, and on step 4 you can add fields to the table that is displayed above the view.

• Add Author to the project properties: File, Properties, Author: Your Name or Team’s Name.
• Display the Gantt view and remove the Indicators column.
• Display the Analysis Toolbar: View, Toolbars…, Analysis
• Click the Copy Picture to Office Wizard button on the Analysis toolbar.
• On step 2 review the options.
• On step 3, choose PowerPoint, Word, or Visio.
• Note: when the wizard is done it will automatically launch the program. You must have the program on your system for this to work.
• On step 4 add fields: Cost, Author. Move Author under Title field.
• Click Finish, click Close.

I suggest that you use high level, not too detailed views when using the Copy Picture commands. Also, you will have to experiment to get the view the way you want it to look.

Visual Reports:

Visual Reports are templates that export information to Excel or Visio such as charts, pivot tables, and pivot drawings. You of course need Excel and Visio installed in order to use Visual Reports. Unfortunately, not all of the reports in the Reports menu are in Visual Reports.

• Add standard rates to the resources on the Resource Sheet so that we have some cost data.
• Now look at the some reports to see that the costs have been added to the project. Reports, Overview:Project Summary, Costs: Budget, and Cashflow reports.
• Create a visual report – Cash Flow – Report, Visual Reports, select Cash Flow (Excel icon), View button. This will open up Excel and create a chart and a pivot table. You can then format/modify the chart/pivot table as needed in Excel. For example, on the Task Usage tab change the detail from quarters to weeks by expanding the quarters, click the + next to Q1, Q2, and so on. Look at the chart on the Chart1 tab. Hmm… the horizontal scale looks busy. Two ways to fix this. One is to change the Week 1, 1 - 20 labels in the pivot table on the Task Usage tab to simply 1, 1 – 20. The second way would be to change the horizontal axis on the chart (Chart1 tab) to show the Week labels “stacked.” Right-click the horizontal axis, Format Axis.., Alignment, change the text direction to Stacked.
• Create a visual report – Cash Flow (US) – Report, Visual Reports, select Cash Flow (US) (Visio icon), View button. This will open up Visio and create a drawing. You may then format/modify the drawing as needed in Visio. Note: if you get an error message “Visio is busy…” then start the Visio program and have it open in a window before creating the visual report.

More on Visual Reports Copy Pictures:

To learn more about these features: in MS Project click on the Help menu, select Microsoft Office Project Help option, then search using “print project information.” Click on the Goal: Print project information topic. Do the tutorial called “View a free training course on how to presentyour project information in another Microsoft Office program.” Also, there’s a quick reference at the end of the tutorial that is helpful. Here’s the link to the quick reference:

And finally, in Help search using “visual reports” to get the topic “Watch this: Create a visual report.” This is a quick video on how the Visual Reports work. Also, you will find other links to helpful topics such as “Create a Visual Report” and “Produce a visual report of Project 2007 data in Excel.”

And, remember for chapter 7 we created an Earned Value Visual Report for Excel. See Appendix A.61 lecture notes for chapter 7 on the Lectures page.

Built-in Reports:

You can create any of the built-in reports in the Reports menu. For distribution purposes to users that do not have MS Project or if you want to put a link to the report on a web page, then you can create a PDF file. You will need Adobe Acrobat Professional or a similar program to create the .pdf file. There’s a trick to it. It is similar to the way Access works. When you create a report it goes to the Print Preview window and it will only print to the default printer which typically is not to the Adobe Distiller/PDF Printer. So, you have to go to the Control Panel, Printers, and change the default printer to the Adobe Distiller/PDF Printer. Or, in MS Project with any view open, File, Print, select the Adobe Distiller/PDF Printer and then click the Cancel button. Then, create the report via the Reports menu. When you go to print you will see the Adobe Distiller/PDF Printer is the printer. The other option is to print the report out and then use a scanner to create an electronic version of the report.

Creating .PDF files from Views:

Another option is to display the desired view in MS Project and then print it to the Adobe Distiller/PDF Printer to create the .pdf file. Steps: File, Print, select Adobe Distiller/PDF Printer, save the file. Again, this printer option requires that you have Adobe Professional software installed on your system.

Project Plan PowerPoint Presentation:

Demo chapter 10 homework:

Open the – example presentation file.

• Copy and paste the Gantt chart using the Copy Picture feature.
• In Windows Explorer, create a file folder. Copy the PowerPoint file and all of the related documents in to the file folder.
• Create a hyperlink to other project documents. Use template files for this demonstration. Students should use their actual project document files. Show how the links work in the Slide Show view.
• Show how to zip/compress all of the files in the folder. Steps: Right-click the folder, SendTo, Compressed (zipped) folder.

Creating Web Pages:

Some project teams use a project website to store and communicate project documents.

In MS Project 2003 it was pretty easy to create project documents in Web page formats. Simply do a File, Save As, Web page. But, in 2007 they removed this option. Instead you have to have MS Project 2007 Server in order to create the Web pages. So the “work around” in MS Project 2007 Professional (not server) is to create the view or report in MS Project and then use the Visual Reports or Copy Picture features to get them in to Word, PowerPoint, Visio, or Excel. Then in these programs create the Web pages.

You can create Web pages quickly in Office.

• In Word/PowerPoint/Visio/Excel, select File, Save As, select the Web page .htm, .html file type from the Save as type drop-down list to create a Web page.
• To view the Web page, double-click the .htm file which will open up the file in the Browser. To edit the Web page, right-click the .htm file, Open with…, Word/PowerPoint/Visio/Excel, or start the Word/PowerPoint/Visio/Excel program and open up the .htm file. Make any necessary changes. Save. Then view the page in the browser. Be sure to click the Refresh/Reload button to view the updates. Repeat the edit/view process as needed.

Please note that a .htm/.html file will be created and a file folder with files will be created as well. You must load all of the files to the web server or give all of the files to your Web Master to load on the company server.

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