Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Formatting Text

Different Gantt Chart views may show the critical path in red or slack time as narrow green lines, but text appears in the same old 8-point Arial font. Happily, Project’s text styles make it easy to format text for different categories of information, like row and column headings, text for critical tasks, or text at the same position on task bars.

Whether you want to emphasize critical tasks with bold red letters or your tired eyes beg for larger text, you can use text styles to change formatting quickly and keep formatting consistent. Simply choose the type of information to format (headings, milestones, and so on) and the text formatting you want (font, size, style, color, and background color). Or you can reformat a single string of text for special emphasis, like the “Manager of the Year” caption under your boss’s picture. This section explains how to do both.

Changing Categories of Text

Project text styles are watered-down versions of their Word cousins: Project doesn’t let you change as many text characteristics. Just as a heading style in Word changes all the headings in a document, a text style drapes itself over every occurrence of text in its category. Set the text style for milestone tasks to bold green Verdana font, for example, and the text for every milestone task follows suit. When a task’s or resource’s values change and it no longer fits the category, Project takes care of changing the text formatting to the style for the task’s or resource’s new category. ...