Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Creating Your Own Views

When you don’t have the information you need, making decisions becomes a matter of luck (just ask someone sitting at a blackjack table in Vegas). Yet too much data can obscure the information you need (as anyone trying to choose an insurance policy can tell you). But the right data shown in the right light exposes flaws, highlights solutions, and generally makes managing projects easier.

Modifying Basic View Contents

In Project, a view is nothing more than a compilation of many elements: fields, tables, filters, groups, and layouts (Microsoft calls these layouts screens, as you’ll see shortly). To make big, sweeping changes, you can create a new view and choose the screen and other elements you want. For example, you may prefer to have Task Entry view’s Details pane display Task Details Form view instead of Task Form view.

Modifying views gets a lot easier when you understand the difference between single and combination views. As its name implies, a single view is like a picture window that shows one thing, like Resource Sheet or Task Sheet view. A combination view is like a window in which the top and bottom panes slide up and down; it can have one single view on the top and a different single view on the bottom, like Resource Allocation view, which shows Resource Usage view on top and Leveling Gantt view on the bottom.

Note

Some single views (like Gantt Chart view) include two side-by-side panes: a table on the left and a timescale on the right. These side-by-side ...