Microsoft Office Project 2007 Inside Out
By Teresa S. Stover

Teresa S. Stover is a project management expert who has consulted with the Microsoft Office Project Team since version 4. She is an instructional designer and award-winning author with more than two decades of technical communication experience. Teresa is the author of countless user manuals, tutorials, and help systems — plus more than a dozen computer books, including Microsoft Office Project 2003 Inside Out and Microsoft Project Version 2002 Inside Out.

To learn more about other books on the 2007 Microsoft Office system, visit Microsoft Press.

• Move schedule information from Excel to Project 2007

• Import task dates

• Link imported tasks

Many project managers get their start building simple project schedules in Microsoft Office Excel. Sometimes, not having a copy of Microsoft Office Project 2007 is the reason for using Excel. Other times, the magnitude of the features available in Project 2007 is too daunting. As it turns out, you can get started with Project 2007 by sticking to its basic features; the increase in productivity you obtain quickly pays back the purchase price of the software.

Although you have to invest some time learning to use the program, you’ll recoup that time as well once Project 2007 starts handling the tasks — and the calculations — you had to perform manually before.

In Excel, it’s easy enough to type task names into the cells in the first column of a worksheet. Then, if you type the weeks or months in the first row, you can create something akin to a Gantt chart by highlighting the cells when work is supposed to take place. The problems arise when the project plan changes — and of course, it always does. For example, because Excel doesn’t track task dependencies, you have to manually reschedule your tasks if the project starts late or a task takes longer than you estimated. In addition, if you want to track durations, costs, or other project information, you have to craft your own formulas to do so. Then, if you consider the difficulty of using an Excel worksheet to assign resources to work on tasks, using Project 2007 starts to look like a better and better idea.

Move schedule information from Excel to Project 2007

After you decide to use Project 2007 to plan and track projects, the next step is to decide how best to make the transition from Excel to Project 2007. If you manage projects of short duration, the easiest approach is to manage new projects with Project 2007 and continue using your old approach until the projects in progress are complete. However, if your projects run longer, or you can’t abide your manual management approach one more day, you can transfer some, if not all, of your project information from Excel to Project 2007. How much you can move over depends on how you represented project data in Excel.

Your Excel file most likely includes a column with task names. At the very least, you can import those task names into Project 2007 to set up your task list. If you also include columns for task duration and assigned resources, you can import those fields as well.

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Import task dates

In your Excel file, suppose you include columns for start and finish dates. Project 2007 is a powerful scheduling tool because you don’t have to specify when tasks start and finish. Instead, you define how tasks depend on each other and Project 2007 handles the start and end date calculations. However, when you import start and finish dates from Excel, the imported tasks include built-in date constraints, resulting in an over-restricted schedule and possible scheduling conflicts.

As it turns out, it’s easier to build task dependencies and remove the date constraints in Project 2007. For example, after you import the tasks, the tasks can be linked to form task dependencies. Then, insert the Constraint Type column into the table area of the Gantt Chart view. To remove all the date constraints, in the first Constraint Type cell, choose As Soon As Possible. Then, drag the small black square at the bottom right corner of the cell over all the other Constraint Type cells.

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Link imported tasks

After you import tasks from an Excel file into a Project 2007 file, your first step is to create links (dependencies) between the tasks. For example, the “Paint Wall” task has a Finish-to-Start dependency with the “Paint Window Trim” task. If the tasks you import include durations, all you have to do is set the start date for the project, and — based on the project start date, the task dependencies, and their durations — Project 2007 calculates the start and end dates for all the tasks.

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