Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Changing Tables

Views like Gantt Chart and Task Usage come with a table of information on the left—each column is a Project field. (Sometimes, the table is the only thing in the view, like in Resource Sheet view.) Project comes with several built-in tables, like Entry and Cost, that contain frequently used collections of fields. Like most elements in Project, you can change which table you see, what the table contains, and how data is displayed to suit your needs.

You can easily swap the table you see in a view—for instance, to switch from a summary to a table that shows performance compared with the baseline. But you can also change the columns in a table by temporarily adding columns, or permanently adding, removing, and rearranging columns to reflect how you work. Going a step further, the table’s column width, row height, and a few other options are customizable so you can make a table look exactly the way you want.

Note

Project dutifully records every change you make to a table, so the table shows those changes every time you apply it. Project stores the customized table in your Project file, although it has the same name as the original, built-in table. To use both the original and your custom version, make a copy of the built-in table first, and then modify it as described on Modifying a Table Definition. If you create a customized table that you want to use in other files, use the Organizer to copy it from your Project file to the global template or another file (Copying Elements ...