So, the other thing that I could want to do is I would like to summarize that project. I would like to show it in terms of some kind of a work breakdown structure. So I'm going to add a summary here. So, again, what I did is selected all the rows. And I added a summary task. So I'm going to make it that project level. Project, I'm going to call it, example 1. One thing to note is that this duration is working days. Now typically, when we're showing working days, when we're showing number of days to take for the project to be completed, now granted then how you solve that example in previous manual exercises. You didn't take into account calendars, you didn't take into account working days and non-working days. So this is assuming that you're working everyday. So this is 18 days. But, what Microsoft Project is doing, is that this is the working day duration. What about the calendar day duration? How much time difference is there between October 26th and October 3rd? So what you can do is you can add a new column. So let me remove this resource column right here. You can add the new column and call it calendar day duration, or let me call it duration in terms of calendar days. And I'm going to edit that field, from right-click and then Field Settings. Here you basically select which location you want it to be in within your custom fields. You want to give it a title. You can select the width, the alignment and so on. So that selects that formatting and then you go to the Custom Field Settings. And then we actually want to make it a formula. So I clicked on the radio button right here to make it a formula, and then clicked on formula. That allows me to add any type of formula in that field to calculate a special type of field that is not generally offered by Microsoft Project. So what I'm going to do is I want the date difference formula. So I'm going to say I'm inserting a function, I'll take that out. I'm inserting a function and that function is a function of date or time. And it's actually date difference. So it's the difference between one date and the other. So the interval, it's typically do you want the difference in terms of months, days, hours, years, so I want the difference in terms of days. So I'm going to type in dd, that's for days, that's the code for days. And then the difference is between date one, which is the finish date. So, these fields are predefined fields within Microsoft Project that you can select from. So finish. And then comma, start. I actually added both. Let's see how that works. So again, the difference, and then the interval is a day, and then the first date. There's the start and the second date is the finish. So notice here that this duration is in working days, not in calendar days, so if we want to add a column for calendar days we can insert a column and then we would have to add a custom column. So we can go to duration, And then edit that field. And then we can rename the field to read calendar days in terms of duration, and insert a formula. So we can insert predetermined formulas from that function drop-down for date and time, you can click on Date Difference. The interval is a day. So the short for that is d, the first date is the start date and the second date is the finish date. And we don't need the rest of that formula. So once we enter that formula, we've got calendar days as opposed to working days, which makes more sense for the readers that are not thinking in terms of working days. The other item is that you notice here that the sum just showing zero because we didn't set it up to rollup that total project duration correctly. So if we go back to edit the settings of that field, we can see how it wants to calculate for a group or a summary of rows. So we're going to use the formula as well. So the formula will figure out what's the start date of the project, the end date of the project, and calculate again. So here you'll notice that it's 23 days rather than the 18 days that are from within that portion of the working days. The other item that you can also say is that fine, so I created this schedule, and I created it in Microsoft Project, but typically people want to see the critical path items highlighted in red. So, first thing is let's see where the critical path items are. So let's add a column to show the float. So that's a predetermined term that's within Microsoft Project and within project that's called total slack rather than float. So that shows you that the float for activity C is actually three days which matches with all the manual calculations that you've done. And then you can start looking at all right, so clearly A, B, and E, and G are representing the critical path, so how do I represent that visually within that gap chart? So I can right click here and I can click on bar styles. So that gives me all the different formats for every bar that's shown on that schedule. So in order to do that, you can go towards the very bottom, and some of you may have that predetermined automatically within their platform. So you can say, I'm going to add a new row, I'm going to call it critical, and I would like the bar to have whichever shape, so you can have it as a narrower bar, a thicker bar, solid bar, so I'm going to make it solid. And I'm going to make it red. So now you just called it critical. So a lot of people would call it critical and save it and call it a day, but that doesn't really make sure that it represents the right bars because you didn't tell it for which tasks. So is it shown for all tasks or just for specific ones? So I'm going to say here I only want to show it for critical tasks. So that means that whatever is defined by the platform as critical it's going to be shown as red. You could also say I want to add a description of that critical path activity if you only want to show the bar chart. So, let's say two words the top I want to add the task name. And within Microsoft Project, it's just name. And of course, you can click on that drop-down menu rather than typing in and you click OK. So you'll notice here that it showed the critical path in red. It showed the name of the task right above it. And you can also show the name, of course, for all other activities. So you can still right-click bar styles. And this regular task, you can edit and show at the top the name of the task. So this gives you some kind of presentable bar chart that you can demonstrate for your project team. The other things that you can do within project is you can also start going back to that task of view, and you can start seeing different formats. So you can start seeing the natural diagram, so that shows you exactly what, again, you did manually. But it shows it to you very quickly, very automatically much faster than you would do it manually and with greater certainty. You can also edit the view of each of these boxes, so you can click on any of them, right-click and click on information. And you can define what is shown in terms of fields, in terms of notes on this task. So this is the information about that task, and you can change the layout of that task. So this format of the box shows you, okay, this is a template, this is a standard template. You can use any other template that's out there or you can create your own. So this is the template, you can copy that, copy of standard and you can let's say I wanted to add the float. Right here I will add total slack. And I'm going to use that format. So now it shows. Let me adjust that again. And utilize that template that I created. Click OK. So now this box as opposed to any other box shows that total float on the box. You can also view the schedule in a calendar view, so you can see which activities are taking place when. That's typically useful in terms of look-aheads. So, if you want to show the activities that are happening during a certain month, but of course, not too many activities. If you want to give each superintendent the area or location that they're working in. So the activities that they're responsible for and what's supposed to be happening during given times of each week. That's very helpful. Then if we go back to the Gantt chart view. There are other items about the project that should also be setup. So first thing we talked about is listing all the activities, creating all these relationships. If you want to view in terms of this view to show the columns where the type of relationship is shown. So you could also show the type of the task as well. So all these are different task types. And you can also assign any task to be a milestone. So let's say I'm just going to add a milestone here. I'll call it Milestone 1. I'm going to give it zero days duration. I'm going to have it as the predecessor has to be C. So I have to type in four. And I'm going to just highlight that row to make it clear. And notice here that because the duration is 1, it show as a diamond shape. That's not because I specified that the type of the activity is a milestone yet. So let me right-click here and then if you right-click on the task information, so that's the information for that task, and that's the part that we said we would come back to that advanced portion so task type is again fix units. And then the constraint is as soon as possible so that means you have to follow the relationship. The constraint dates, if there is a constraint, so if I have to start this milestone on a specific date and ignore the relationships that are in the schedule, I can specify that constraint. It's typically not recommended because you're forcing the schedule to demonstrate something that is against that critical path method calculation. Specify that calendar, so I'm just going to take the calendar with the holidays. And then this check box right here that really identifies whether this is a milestone or not. Now, Microsoft Project automatically, because it's a zero day activity, makes it a milestone, but not necessarily. So, I need to make sure that check box is checked. To make sure that this activity is in fact a milestone. So you can do so much more with Microsoft Project, depending on the size of your project and your schedule, so you can definitely see the ease of use there with copying and pasting activities. I can definitely copy-paste any type of activities here. I can break down the work, so if I want to make D, E, F, and G, for example, as part of another work breakdown structure. So I can call it work breakdown structure one. I'll take that one out. And I can put A, B, and C under another work breakdown structure. So you can do all kinds of different things within Microsoft Project. That's very easy to use, very simple, very similar to Microsoft Office. You can format items, you can add activities, remove activities, change dates with a very easy approach and you don't need much training to get to that point where you utilize Microsoft Project. So, now that we've covered the simpler aspect, the simpler software application, I'm going to jump into P6 which takes slightly more time. And as requires a little bit of more of an experience rather than a simple interface like Microsoft Project.
