August, 2009

Deadline dates are handy way to alert you to problems in your schedule, but they are often overlooked. Project managers will often try to create a deadline for a task by setting a task's start date or finish date. But entering the start and finish date sets a date constraint (or restriction) on the task, which limits the flexibility of your schedule and prevents Project from automatically handling the scheduling of your project.

If you want a task to start or finish on a certain date but want to retain the flexibility of the schedule, you can enter a deadline date. Double-click on a task, and on the Advanced tab, enter a date in the Deadline box. A green arrow will appear on your Gantt chart that marks the deadline date. And if the task doesn't finish by the deadline date, a nasty icon will appear in the Indicators column to warn you.

Well this took a little longer to get up here than I had anticipated, but at long last, here’s the first video in our interview series, “Ask a Project PM.” In this interview, Bonny Lau, Program Manager for Microsoft Project, fields your questions on resource leveling. Many thanks to those who submitted questions!

Passing along some great info…Report Pack II for Project Server 2007 has been released! This is great news because it addresses A) WHAT reports you should run in your Project Server 2007 environment, and B) WHY you should run them. It includes 40 Management and Governance reports, designed by top Microsoft consultants who deploy and enhance the Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution for customers regularly.

Want more? Christophe has a great blog post with more detail here, and there’s an excellent recorded webcast about Report Pack II available here.

Ready to download? More info and a download link here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/EPMReportPack

Thanks to the users  who suggested that all of us in Project-land should post more keyboard shortcuts. Here are some more. Some of the following come from user comment postings, and some of my own that I use daily.  Please keep your comments pouring in.

Here you go:

And if you missed the previous posting of keyboard magic, here they are repeated.