Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Chapter 4. Creating a Simple Project

In the first few chapters of this book, you’ve gotten a brief introduction to projects and project management, and taken a quick tour of the program. Maybe you’re intimidated by all the commands you’ve seen on the ribbon, the shortcut menus, the status bar, and so on. And you’ve probably noticed just how many moving parts the Project window has. If you’re wondering whether you need to master all of these things before you can do anything in Project, rest easy because you don’t.

This chapter shows you just how easy building a project can be. It starts with creating a new Project file and creating a list of tasks for the work that has to be done. Then you’ll learn how to tell Project how long tasks should take. After that, you’ll do a little organizing: creating summary tasks to keep related tasks together. The next step is linking tasks to build a sequence of work, which results in a schedule that takes you from project start to finish. Finally, you’ll add resources to tasks. And voilà—you have your first project schedule!

The rest of this book uses organizing and running a bike-ride fundraising event as a sample project. This chapter sticks to the charitable theme, but on a much smaller scale. Suppose you want to support your favorite charity by riding in its cycling fundraiser with a small team of your cycling compatriots. Your team goal is to raise $5,000, so you decide that you need to treat this undertaking as a project. In this chapter, you’ll ...