About the Microsoft Project UserVoice

Hello reader,

UserVoice blog post icon

In between creating my own YouTube channel, celebrating 4 years together with my lovely wife, the first birthday of Louise and a holiday to Tuscany. I’ve also started drafting a new TPC series of posts. These will be about the most requested/useful/interesting/frustrating UserVoice items that are in the Microsoft Project UserVoice page.

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Introducing the free TPC OneDrive

Exciting news! I have just created an outlook e-mail address. And (you may be aware of this) Microsoft provides every outlook.com user with a OneDrive file share with 5 GB of free storage. I call it the TPC OneDrive (TPC as in The Project Corner of course).

TPC OneDrive cloud storage

 

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Units vs Peak units in Microsoft Project

Hi readers,

Here is a follow up post related to the post Using max units in Microsoft Project. In that post I talk about the max units of a resource in length. However as the post got bigger and bigger I knew I needed to do some follow up posts. This will be the first follow up.

I try to keep the post short because there is a lot of great content already available on the subject (to which I will happily refer at the end of the post). Continue reading Units vs Peak units in Microsoft Project

About Percent Complete in Microsoft Project

Hello readers,

In this post I will take an extensive look at a set of fields that report progress in the schedule. I will have a close look at the Percentage complete entities within Microsoft Project There are % complete, % work complete fields and then there is also something called Physical % complete. In the field I get asked about the differences between the 3 fields on a regular basis. This post will help clear up some of the confusion, I hope.

March 2016 update ——————
Raphael Santos, Consultant at Sensei Project Solutions, is kind enough to provide a translated version of this post in Portuguese. Here is the link: http://www.raphael-santos.net/2016/03/campos-de-percentual-concluido-do-Microsoft-Project.html.

@Raphael; thanks man!
———————————————

Continue reading About Percent Complete in Microsoft Project

The Office templates within Microsoft Project

Hi there readers,

First of all, let me thank all of you. I just reached 11K views since I started this blog in Q3 2013. Amazing, thank you all for reading the blog.

This post has been on my mind for quite some time now, ever since I wrote the 80-20 blogpost. Microsoft offers a number of standard templates trough their service Office.com that can be reached via the application. There are templates for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and even Microsoft Project. Great! But, have you ever taken a look at what is there? Me neither, so let’s take a look together.

— Supplements —

Erik here, I took a close look at all the comments and decided to upload the 5 templates I discussed in this article to the Project Corner OneDrive. There seems to be an issue with the office.com templates where some people are unable to access them. I also found out that people were searching for MS Project Budget templates, so I created a post about this.

Please feel free to download any of the files that are on The Project Corner OneDrive. Hope you enjoy the rest of the post.

—end of supplements—

Continue reading The Office templates within Microsoft Project

The 80-20 for Microsoft Project

During the two weeks I was taking care of little Wendy I also started reading The Four Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss. And apart from being an excellent guide to rapid fat-loss and perfecting sleep, there is one real interesting concept that got stuck in my mind: The Pareto or 80-20 principle. Tim is a great source for finding the 20% that produces 80% of the desired results. Now, let’s find out that 20% for Microsoft Project use!

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Book review: Successful project management

Hi Readers,
Successful project management
I just finished another book and I wanted to share my thoughts with you. The book is called Successful project management with the sub title “Applying best practices and real-world techniques with Microsoft Project”. If that doesn’t sound like a good start I don’t know what does :-).

The book is written by Bonnie Biafore, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Project Conference in Anaheim and who wrote an interesting guest post on The Project Corner concerning Multiple Baselines. If you’re reading this before the first of may 2014 you can even win this book by commenting on her guest post! Continue reading Book review: Successful project management

Hard Constraint vs. Deadline – Guest blog

Introducing my second guest blogger: Nenad Trajkovski from the blog: http://ntrajkovski.com/. Nenad has been one of my favorite bloggers since I started working with MS Project years ago. I have retweeted a number of his very interesting blog posts on numerous occasions. He has a great style of blogging where he uses easy to understand images more than he uses words. So when we bumped into each other at the Project Conference 2014 I just had to ask if he was willing to do a guest post on my blog. Because my post on date related planning has seen some high attention lately I wanted to ask Nenad to share his view on the matter. Without further ado, here is his post.

Continue reading Hard Constraint vs. Deadline – Guest blog

A Microsoft Project quick win post “fixing a task that doesn’t move”

Hi readers,

I would just like to share a quick post with you that is closely related to Flaw 1 in my series on incorrect use of Microsoft Project stand alone version. What I want to do here is a quick win post: One that you can read in 5 minutes, but makes your live a lot easier afterwards.

Continue reading A Microsoft Project quick win post “fixing a task that doesn’t move”

Building a view in Microsoft Project, the correct way

As a consultant I travel between lots of companies that use Microsoft Project. Most of the time they use the product as a standalone scheduling tool when I first visit them. The common case is that they have taught themselves how to use the product and most of the time things go relatively smoothly.

This is not the case with views. Views in Microsoft Project are almost always created poorly. This post will be about creating views and about maintaining them properly. Continue reading Building a view in Microsoft Project, the correct way