The default method of grouping tasks in Microsoft Project by Summary Tasks (WBS) works perfectly well for lookahead schedules, however adding another lookahead schedule View with tasks group by dates can be useful to the project team
Do you want to highlight tasks that are late on your Microsoft Project Lookahead schedule Gantt chart? Then follow the steps outlined in this video on how to format Bar Styles to draw focus to tasks that are late when compared to their baseline finish dates.
Do you want to carry out variance analysis against more than one baselines in Microsoft Project but cannot find a way to do so out of the box?
Custom Field is my go to feature whenever I need a workaround in Microsoft Project and again they have come to the rescue. In this YouTube video, I demonstrate how to calculate and display variances against multiple baselines (Baseline1 to Baseline10) and not just Baseline (Baseline0) field.
This YouTube video demonstrates one way to add a milestone on a Microsoft Project Task bar (same row), e.g., Stage Gate, Go-Live date or a Decision Point.
Note that for this solution to work, the Task Mode must be set to Auto Scheduled.
While Microsoft Project does not have a straight of the vbox Level of Effort activity type like primavera P6, you can still add Hammock or Level of Effort tasks to your Microsoft Project schedule, using one of 2 workarounds.
The first workaround is the recommended method from Microsoft while the second method is one that is very common in the subsea construction world.
Sometimes during project budget proposal requests, bidders might only want to show indicative dates in their bid schedules to the client and an easy way to do this is by showing only the month and year of a task in a Microsoft Project schedule.
While Primavera P6 users are restricted to same date format for all Layouts of a schedule, Microsoft Project users have the luxury of using different date formats in different Views of the same schedule.
How would you like to create a rolling date lookahead filter in Microsoft Project instead of using the default Date Range filter? Users of Primavera P6 are used to defining the criteria for lookahead filters using Data Date or Current Date and we can also do same in Microsoft Project using Status Date or Current Date rather than pick hard dates all the time using the Date Range filter.
While one can update Actual Start and/or Actual Finish dates in Microsoft Project by displaying these columns, my preferred method is using the Task Details Form which is very similar to the Activity Details Form in Primavera P6.
In this short video, I show how to enable and use the Task Details Form to update actual dates for project tasks.
There are times when stakeholders use week numbers to discuss the dates in a project schedule and they would like to see columns of week numbers in the schedule. The tutorial outlines steps to follow in order to display week numbers such as "2021 Week 35" in a Microsoft Project schedule.
The tutorial uses 2 custom fields with formulas to show "Start Week No." and "Finish Week No." columns. The formulas for these 2 columns are: