Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Organizing Tasks

If you’re in high gear churning out project tasks, you can gleefully insert, delete, and rearrange tasks in the WBS outline as you go—and the resulting WBS looks exactly the same as one methodically typed from the top down. The methods for adding, moving, and changing outline levels for tasks are the same whether you’re creating or modifying a WBS. This section covers all the options from adjusting the outline of tasks to adding, removing, and rearranging tasks. If you’re building a formal WBS, you’ll also learn how to customize the WBS code format to your liking (or your company’s standard).

Inserting Summary Tasks

Summary tasks help you plan, track, and manage project work, as described in the section Breaking Down Work into Manageable Chunks on page 124. If you entered all your WBS tasks into Project in one fell swoop, you can turn existing tasks into summary tasks by changing their outline level as described in the next section. But, if you want to insert a new summary task (in any Gantt Chart view), you can choose from the following three methods:

• Insert a new summary task with a new subtask. This method is perfect if you want to add an entirely new batch of work, so you need to insert a new summary task and a new subtask. Click a blank Task Name cell, and then, in the Task tab’s Insert section, click Summary. Project selects the Task Name cell, which now contains the text “<New Summary Task>,” as shown in Figure 6-6, so you can simply start typing to name the ...