Microsoft Project 2007: The Missing Manual

Appendix B. Getting Help for Project

Microsoft Project may be your first introduction to project management concepts like critical path (Finding the Best Tasks to Shorten) and work breakdown structure (Identifying the Work to Be Done). For you, Project presents a double challenge; learning what the program’s commands and checkboxes do, and learning what to do with them. Or maybe you’re a project management expert, and just want the dirt on how to use the features to get your work done: scheduling, budgeting, and reports. For you, learning Project is a technical exercise: which menu to pull down first, which button never to click, and how to avoid the program’s gotchas and limitations.

Either way, your biggest challenge may be getting the information you need from Project’s Help menu. Online help has a reputation for stating the obvious, and Project 2007 Help is no exception. Earlier versions of Project Help (2000 and 2002) linked help topics to project management goals, but, unfortunately, Microsoft hath taken away. The Project Guide is the one vestige of project management activities linked to Project features. Over time, Help has regressed to the feature-centered how-to help everyone’s learned to tolerate.

This chapter explains how to make the best of the help that Project offers. These days, searching by keywords is the mainstay, so this chapter explains where to search for answers and how to ask the right questions. If you prefer scanning a table of contents, it’s there if you ...