Читать книгу Microsoft Project For Dummies - Cynthia Dionisio Snyder, Cynthia Snyder Dionisio - Страница 45

Remember in elementary school when your teacher made you create an outline to organize your work? The outline helped you arrange content and allowed you to focus on different levels of information to keep everything organized.

With the invention of computer outlining, the capability to focus on only certain portions of an outline comes into its own, because you can easily expand and collapse an outline to show or hide different levels of information — or entire sections of your outline. The black triangle symbol next to the Walls summary task in Figure 3-1 indicates that all subtasks below it are displayed. The clear triangle next to the Equipment summary task indicates that the subtasks aren’t displayed. Remember that all summary tasks are in bold in the project outline.

This capability means that you can hide all but the upper level of tasks in a project to give your manager an overview of progress. Or you can collapse every phase of your project except the one in progress so that your team can focus on only those tasks in a status meeting. Or you can collapse most of your outline to make it easy to move to a late phase of a very large schedule.

If you want to hide all the summary tasks and just see the child tasks, you can go to the Format tab in the Gantt Chart Tools context tab group and uncheck the Summary Tasks box (see Figure 3-2). Another nifty feature in Project is the ability to choose which level of detail you want to see in your outline. To wrangle the tasks to the level you want them, it’s best to work with the View tab. In the View tab under the Data group, there is a drop-down option called Outline. Figure 3-3 shows you the commands you can use to control how your outline appears.

You can use the Show Subtasks command and the Hide Subtasks command at any level of summary tasks. Just select the summary task you want — regardless of whether it’s at Level 1 or Level 5 — and click Show Subtasks to see everything underneath, or click Hide Subtasks to just see the summary task.

When you want an overview of your project, it’s helpful to look at it from Level 1 or Level 2. You can see Desert Rose Security at Level 1 in Figure 3-2. Notice the duration for each of the summary level tasks. You can see how they nest within the Project Summary Task.

Figure 3-4 shows Perimeter and Equipment at Level 2. This level gives you a good overview of the work with a bit more detail than Level 1. Level 2 is the view I like to show management or other high-level stakeholders to give them an overall understanding of the project.

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FIGURE 3-3: Outline options.

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FIGURE 3-4: Level 2 outline.

To quickly reveal all subtasks in a project, click the Outline button and then click All Subtasks.

To show subtasks from the keyboard, you can press Alt+Shift+* (asterisk). To hide subtasks, you can press Alt+Shift+- (hyphen) or Alt+Shift+– (minus sign) if you’re using the numeric keypad.