Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Working with Visual Reports

The questions that stakeholders ask in status meetings shift like quicksand: “When did costs start exceeding the budget? How are employees doing compared with contractors? Who’s available to help bail out troubled tasks?” Although graphical reports are easy to edit and provide lots of options for displaying information, Project’s visual reports use Excel pivot charts and Visio pivot diagrams so you can change them on the fly, whether to respond to questions or to drill down in several directions to unearth problems.

The ability to slice and dice data in different ways sets these reports apart from other reports, whether you use the graphical reports in Project or you generate reports from a high-powered reporting tool. For example, you may start with a visual report that shows costs by fiscal quarter, but one quick change and the report can show costs by phase or resource instead. It’s just as easy to change the report’s graph from cost to work, examine a few time periods in detail while summarizing others, or look at specific tasks and resources. The box below explains what makes visual reports tick.

Project gets you started with several built-in visual reports (see below), whose initial presentation is like the serving suggestions you see on cracker boxes. You can modify the report in real time until it’s the way you want.

This section starts with the easy part: generating a visual report. Your options for massaging the report multiply once the report ...