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Video: Opening and Closing Projects; Switching Windows; Pinning to Recent List

Toby: Hello and welcome back to our course on Microsoft Project 2013. In this section we’re

going to look at opening and saving projects. So far we’ve opened a project by selecting it from the recent list on the start screen. Now, of course, over time that recent list is going to tend to get too long to all fit on the start screen and you’re going to find that things drop off the bottom of the list. Now there is a way to some extent of overcoming that and we’ll look at that in just a moment. But in general terms, if you want to open a project and it isn’t on the recent list there, you need to look at the option below the list where it says Open other projects. And if you click on that, it takes you to the Open page in Backstage View. Now you then have a list of potential locations for a project that you want to open. At the top of the list, you have the recent projects list. You can open a project from your SkyDrive. I’m going to tell you about SkyDrive later on in the course. But think of it as what many people nowadays refer to as Cloud based storage. So these are projects that you’ve got stored on Microsoft SkyDrive. Computer basically takes you to the device that you’re using and allows you to browse through the device to find a project that you have stored locally. And at a place, as we’ll see later on, gives us an option to add to this list. We’ll come back to that later. For the moment, let’s click on Computer.

Now when you click on Computer, you’re given a list of folders you have recently accessed. One of those is going to be the one with the example files that come with this course. So if I click on that, it takes me through to that list of example files. You’ll have a list, it may not look exactly the same as this but generally speaking it will be very similar to this. And from this you could take one of the files that we’ve already worked on, select it, and then having selected it you can either click Open or you can just double click on it to open that particular project. So if I wanted to open example_06, double click and the project opens.

Now let’s suppose that I want to open another project as well. I’d like to open Project 4. I don’t need to close Project 6 to do that. I can go into Backstage View, click on Open, and then if I go for Computer again, instead of using the recent folders list, I can just use the Browse button down here and that allows me to browse in pretty much the usual way through the content of my

device. So I can choose from the available disc drives, internal disc drive, memory sticks, network drives, whatever I’ve got attached to my device, choose an appropriate project and open it up. Now one thing to notice when you’re trying to open a project like this is that effectively Project 2013 filters the files that you’re looking at. So if I go into a particular folder such as this one the files that it’s showing me are not every file that’s in that folder. The filter in force by default is a filter that shows me just the files with extension MPP and that’s the default extension for Microsoft Project files. If I click on the drop down on the right here then I can look instead of Project’s MPP files, I could look for MPT files which are Microsoft Project templates. And there are various other possibilities such as Excel workbooks because I can import content for a Microsoft Project file from a workbook, an Excel binary workbook, an Excel earlier version workbook, and so on. There are a number of possibilities there, and one of the other options I have is to specify all files. And if I select the option of All files, I’ll see all of the files that are in that particular folder. So let me choose example_04, click on Open, and now we have Project 4 open as well as Project 6; although you can only see Project 4 at the moment.

Now when you have more than one Project file open at once, it’s quite straightforward to switch between them. One of the options you have is to use the switching facility within Windows. I’m using Windows 8 here but the switching facility with Windows 7 when you’re in desktop mode is pretty much the same. Hold the Alt key down and press the Tab key repeatedly and that will let you step through all of the available open windows and each of the projects you have open will have a window that you can switch to using this approach. From within Project itself, if you click on the View tab one of the groups is Window and in the right hand top corner of the Window Group there’s a drop down here that says Switch Windows. Click on the drop down and it lists the open projects. Now at the moment we’ve got a tick against example_04. If I wanted to switch to example_06, I’d select that instead and that takes me to the Project example_06 that I also have open. So you can have more than one project open at once. That’s not a problem.

And whenever you’ve finished working with a project, you have a couple of options. If you click on Backstage View, File, one of the options there is Close and that will close the specific project that you have selected in view at the moment. If you close Project itself, so if you use for example the top right hand button here to close Project, then it will close all of the individual

projects you have open at that time. Let’s just close this individual project here by clicking on the Close button back there is Backstage View. That closes one project and we’re back to just having Project number 4 open. The other way that you can close a single project is in a line with the tabs above the Ribbon, there’s this X at the right here and that Close window closes only the current project window. So in this case that will close Project 4. So if I click on that Close button, Project 4 is closed. In fact, Project 2013 is still running but I now have no projects open so it waits for me to either open an existing project or create a new one.

Now let me just go back to that Open page again and again look at this list of recent projects. If you hover over one of the recent projects, you can see on the right there that there’s a little push pin. And if you have a particular project, say, Project 6 that we don’t want to fall off of the bottom of the recent projects list. If you click on the push pin, it pins it to the list which means it stays fixed there until you unpin it. If you click on the picture of the pin again, it will be unpinned. Now exactly the same principle applies on the start screen where you have the list of recent projects on the left. You can pin a project there and that way it won’t fall off of the recent projects list. And as I mentioned earlier that’s one way of overcoming the problem when you’ve been dealing with a large number of projects, of projects that you access often falling off of the bottom of the recent projects list.

So that’s enough on opening and closing projects for now. In the next section we’re going to take a look at saving projects. So please join me for that.

Video: Saving Projects; File Formats; AutoSave

Toby: Welcome back to our course on Microsoft Project 2013. In the previous section, we

looked at opening and closing projects, and one of the things we did was to pin example_06 to the recent projects list and you can see that on the start screen now pinned to the list. But what I’d like to do in this section is to look at saving projects and I’m going to start by opening one of the first projects we worked on, House build 01 here just by selecting it from the recent projects list.

Now when you’re working on a project, from time to time it’s a good idea to save it, make sure that your work doesn’t get lost. There is a button normally enabled on the Quick Access Toolbar, a picture of an old style diskette which is by default the standard image for Save. You can also see from the screen tip there that there is a keyboard shortcut of Control and S to save the project that you’re currently working on.

We also saw earlier on the Save As option from Backstage View and when you do File, Save As and let’s again choose Computer and let’s stick with the same folder that that file was stored in, my scratch folder, then when you do a save, by default as with Open, the default save type is Project MPP. But there are various other save types as well and I want to take a quick look at those now.

Now of course, if I just did a save now with a type of MPP, I’d effectively overwrite the file that I’m already working on. But if I click on the drop down on Save As Type, I can see the list of other options that are available to me. Now first of all, we have a group of options that relate to earlier versions of Microsoft Project. There’s Microsoft Project 2007, *.mpp, and Microsoft Project 2000 to 2003, *.mpp. The file extension MPP has been common throughout but the format has actually changed over many versions. The format that’s used in the 2013 version is the same as the 2010 version. Before that there was a 2007 format and then before that there was a format that was used in 2000, 2002, and 2003 versions of Microsoft Project. Before that there was a format that was used with the Project 98 version. But using Project 2013, you cannot save a Project file in the Project 98 format, although you can read those older formats. So the file extension hasn’t changed but the formats have. That’s something to be careful of. Why might you want one of these old formats? Well, if you’re working with other people that have older versions of Project, you may need to agree on one of the older formats so that you can all work

on the files. But the newer format is the one to use if you don’t have that constraint because it supports all of the new features of Microsoft Project.

You can save a Microsoft Project as a template. We’ll talk about templates a little bit later on or in the old format of template. You can also save the project as a PDF which we’re going to do a little example of in just a moment. And then you have an option of saving it as the Microsoft version of PDF if you like which is XPS. And then you can also save it as an Excel workbook and this is effectively exporting it into Excel so that you can do other work on the tasks in Microsoft Excel. I’m going to have a little brief look at that later on in the course as well.

You then have options to save the project in text format, comma separated values, CSV format, and XML format. But as I say just by an example let’s try saving this one in that folder but as a PDF and see what it looks like. So select PDF and click on Save. I get a dialog box. I can choose what range of dates I want to save. I’m going to choose all dates. And then I can choose whether to include nonprinting information, document properties, document showing markup, and then the PDF options a bit of a technical option. Let’s not worry too much about that, but you don’t need to bother to check that. Click on OK and now let me open up that PDF and we’ll take a look at that.

So now I’ve opened that PDF file in Adobe Reader X and you can see the Gantt Chart; very straightforward, of course, at the moment. I’ve just go that one task in there. And then there’s a little summary at the bottom; a key, legend, etc. to explain what the various symbols mean. Although, of course, most of those symbols don’t yet appear as we’ve got such a simple schedule at this stage. So that is saving a project as a PDF file.

Now we come to something very important in relation to save and that is to look at the Project Options relating to save. So in Backstage View, if I look at Options, there is a page dedicated to Save. And the first option on that page is to select the default save format. Now by default, it’s at the current version of the MPP format, but you could save in an earlier format, the 2007 format or the 2000 to 2003 format. You might choose this as I said a little while ago if you were working with other people and you’d agreed on using one of the earlier formats by default, and setting that as your default is probably a good idea. It would reduce the chance of you accidentally saving in the current format. You can also choose a default file location. Now

when you start using Project 2013, this defaults to your User Documents Folder within Windows but you can save it to do a different one. I could have set this to save in the folder that I’m saving the Project file in.

The next important option is AutoSave. Now I mentioned earlier in this section that you should save your work regularly. Well, I would go one step farther and I should say that you should have AutoSave set on to save your work regularly for you. In much older versions of Project and particularly when people were using older PCs with lower performance, AutoSave could be a bit of a pain actually because you’d notice a degradation in performance while AutoSave was happening. And even now if you’ve got a very big project and say it’s being saved over a network or something like that, it can slow you down for a while. But generally speaking, AutoSave on a modern device you’ll barely notice it happening if at all. And if you set the AutoSave on and set the interval at say 10 minutes, which is the default, the worst thing that can happen if your PC crashes or your power goes off or something awful happens is that you’ll lose the last 10 minutes worth of work. You have an option when you set AutoSave on as you can see here from saving the active project, that’s the one that you’re currently working on or all open projects. As we’ll see later if you have a very complex situation maybe with many projects maybe sharing resources, you may have quite a few open projects open at once and saving them all again on a modern PC with good performance you’ll barely notice it happening. But it does increase the chance, particularly if you’ve got big projects and you’re using an old device, of a save having an impact. So although it’s pretty safe nowadays to have all this switched on, just beware of the fact that it may cause a noticeable sort of slow down for a few moments while it happens.

Now the other options within the Project Options Save page I’ll let you experiment with. Some of them for example are pretty straightforward. This one Save to computer by default, check that, and then by default it will save to Computer rather than trying SkyDrive or somewhere else. But I’ll let you experiment with those, try them out, and see which ones suit you. When you’ve made any changes, of course, click on OK and we’re back to working on Project as normal. So that’s pretty much it on saving but there’s now an exercise for you to do. You saw earlier on how to save the current project, this Build 01 as a PDF and then we looked at the PDF. What I’d like you to do is to do the same thing with Project 06. You can either use the version that came

with the course or the one that you’ve created. I’d like you to save that in PDF format. Use all of the default settings, include all of the dates. My answer to that example is in example_06.pdf. That’s it for this section. I’ll see you in the next one.