Microsoft Project 2013: The Missing Manual

Defining Your Own Fields

Project comes with hundreds of built-in fields that track all sorts of information about projects. However, if you want to track performance that Project’s built-in fields don’t cover, you can modify settings for custom fields and then add those fields to tables in Project views (Changing a Table’s Contents) just as you would any built-in field. For example, you can create a field that holds the number of lines of code written for each development task. By tracking hours worked and code quantities, you can calculate programming productivity.

You can create custom fields that accept only the values you want by defining lookup tables. That way, you or anyone else can pick a valid value from a drop-down list. Custom fields can also contain formulas to calculate results. The usual arithmetic suspects like addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication show up as buttons in the Formula dialog box. But Project offers all sorts of fancy functions that you can combine with any Project field to spit out the answers you’re looking for.

Graphical indicators make it easy to see whether a project is on track, going better than expected, or headed for trouble. By customizing fields, you can tell Project to display icons instead of numbers or text.

Outline code fields work like the WBS values that project managers know and love. You can set up outline codes to categorize tasks and resources, and each level of the outline can have its own rules for values and what those ...